The Pennsylvania State University

The Graduate School

College of Arts and Architecture

FRAMES WITHIN FRAMES: THE PEDAGOGY OF THE ART MUSEUM AS CULTURAL ARTIFACT

A Thesis in Art Education by Suzanne Oberhardt

Copyright 2000 Suzanne Oberhardt

Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

May , 2000 We approve the thesis of Suzanne Oberhardt. Date of Signature

______Charles R. Garoian Director, School of Visual Arts Professor of Art Education Thesis Advisor Chair of Committee

______Paul E. Bolin Associate Professor of Art Education Head of the Department of Art Education

______Marjorie Wilson Associate Professor of Art Education

______Joe L. Kincheloe Professor of Education iii

ABSTRACT

In this thesis, I provoke new ways of seeing the art museum as it is transformed and reinvented in the twenty-first century. The art museum has changed shape. Its bricks have been flattened on paper, celluloid and plastic and diffused into virtual spaces. The relationship between flesh and environment has been irrevocably changed as people no longer have to

attend the built structure of the art museum to know the art museum. It recurs infinitely in our daily lives – on television, movie and computer screens, in books and magazines, and on urban artifacts from matchbook covers to billboards. These representations may not be real art museums per se but they provide the basis upon which most people now partake of the museum’s sacred rituals. I confront the dilemma of defining the cultural and material parameters of the art museum by analyzing it in terms of four frames. A frame is characterized here as something that imposes a fixed border. I use the frame metaphor in multiple ways to deconstruct the museum’s closed system and to set the stage for its reconstruction. Two of the frames are structured by academic discourses: an art historical frame and the frame created by New Museology. These frames have been dominant in determining how we perceive of art museums. The third frame, however, marginalizes the academic voice and shifts the focus to the art museum as cultural artifact in the wider realms of popular culture. Through this frame, I explore how the art museum has been represented in five Hollywood movies: She-Devil, Batman, Born Yesterday, L.A. Story and iv

Absolute Power. Significantly, in these films the art museum becomes a site of sexual encounter and violence. The fourth frame is not so much a content-based frame but a process of renegotiation between the frames. The four frames are then rescripted in pedagogical terms inciting art educators to start a new sense-making venture with new tools and objects. The challenge is to embrace a diversity of perspectives rather than to circumscribe our experience of the art museum within strictly controlled frames. v

TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF FIGURES vii LIST OF TABLES viii PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ix Chapter 1. THE ART MUSEUM: IT ALL DEPENDS ON WHOSE FRAME YOU USE TO LOOK AT IT 1 An anomaly . . . 1 Qualify, propose, justify 10 Method of inquiry 19 Re-viewing art education 24 Related knowledge and research 29 Pedagogy and authority 30 Museums and discourse 37 Popular culture 47 Investigatory plan 54 Chapter one 54 Chapter two 54 Chapter three 55 Chapter four 56 Chapter 2. THE FOUR FRAMES CONTEMPLATED 57 Introduction to the four frames 58 Frame 1. The painting 64 Frame 2. The Painting in/as art museum 71 Frame 3. Art museum as reproduction 82 Frame 4. Art museum in/of popular culture 88 Chapter 3. LOOKING THROUGH FRAME 3: THE PEDAGOGY OF ART MUSEUMS IN POPULAR CONTEMPORARY FILM 97 The rationale . . . 97 Art museums and contemporary film 101 Summary of the films 112 She-Devil (1989, Orion Pictures) 112 Scene featuring an art museum 112 Details of scene 112 vi

Batman (1989, Warner Bros.) 116 Scene featuring an art museum 116 Details of scene 116 L.A. Story (1991, Columbia Tri Star) 120 Scene featuring an art museum 120 Details of scene 120 Born Yesterday (1993, Hollywood Pictures) 124 Scene featuring an art museum 124 Details of scene 125 Absolute Power (1997, Castle Rock International) 129 Scene featuring an art museum 129 Details of scene 129 Analysis of the films 132 Frames on the art museum 133 Insider and outsider characters 136 Violence and the art museum 139 Love and the art museum 146 Gender constructions and the art museum 151 Wishes and the art museum 157 In conclusion 162 Chapter 4. FRAME 4: CONSTRUCTING, DECONSTRUCTING AND RECONSTRUCTING THE FRAME 164 Frame 1: The pedagogy of the bridge 171 Frame 2: The pedagogy of contention 181 Frame 3: The pedagogy of relish 192 Frame 4: The pedagogy of paradox 203 In conclusion 213 To summarize 214 BIBLIOGRAPHY 219 vii

LISTS OF FIGURES

1. The Heuristic Device 5 2. Positioning The Four Frames 7 3. Visualizing The Target 57 4. Highlighting Frame 1 64 5. Highlighting Frame 2 71

6. Highlighting Frame 3 82 7. Highlighting Frame 4 88 8. First Image – Michelangelo’s Creation Of Adam 90 9. Second Image – Kruger’s Untitled 92 10. Third Image – Poulsen’s Advertising 93 11. Pedagogy Across The Frames 166 12. The Pedagogy Of Frame 1 171 13. The Pedagogy Of Frame 2 181 14. The Pedagogy Of Frame 3 192 15. The Pedagogy Of Frame 4 203 viii

LISTS OF TABLES

1. Mass Film Culture Versus Art Museum Culture 105 2. Stereotypical Characteristics of Art Museum Insiders and Outsiders 107 3. Art Museum Locations in the Films 133 4. Insider and Outsider Characterizations in the Films 137 5. Violent Characters and Violence in the Art Museum Scenes 141 6. True Love in the Art Museum 148 7. Female Characters in the Art Museum 152 8. Male Characters in the Art Museum 156 9. Dreams/Wishes and the Art Museum 159 ix

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Traditionally, Australians have looked to the Southern Cross to navigate the land and sea of the southern hemisphere. Up above shine four stars in the formation of a cross to offer direction. Another star nestles just below the eastern star of the cross and two bright pointers, somewhat apart from the others, closer to home, locate the cross in the skies.

I began to write this dissertation in Australia after my return from the United States in May 1997. I seemed to intuitively form it around an unconventional matrix of four frames. Four unreconcilable frames that were part of a complex and often contradictory set of ideological and material processes. It was not until I had finished writing the dissertation that I really came to understand the origins of its conception. Enjoying a particularly long shower, one week on, I started to play merrily with its words and concepts in my mind. Four chapters finished. Four professors on my panel. Four frames. Four chapters finished. Four professors. Four very different professors. Four vastly different teaching styles and views. Were they my four frames? New technologies, tick. Material culture, tick. Social justice, tick, tick. As I tried to patchwork my teachers together into a singular frame - a cacophony of East Coast, West Coast and Southern accents broke loose, not to mention some in Armenian! If I was struggling to reconcile the views of four teachers how could I possibly situate a historical, global icon such as the art museum in just one frame. Thesis and process became apparent. x

I would like to thank the members of my panel for being so bloody hard to reconcile. To Charles Garoian, Marjorie Wilson, Paul Bolin and Joe Kincheloe. You are wonderful teachers and I thank you for your guidance on matters academic as well as personal. So, too, must I thank Bonnie MacDonald, my fellow graduate student and my dear American friend. We studied together, we argued together, we lived together. She brought me books home from the library.

Closer to home, the ideas, catholic upbringings and words of two very special people are tangled alongside my own in this writing. I thank my friend of twenty-five years, Bernadette Lynch, for her brilliant, synthesizing mind. She made me consider and reconsider at every turn. She was my “coach” at the oral defense. And last but certainly not least my husband, Wayne Murphy, with whom I share my life and this dissertation. He is an academic and when he was tired and just wanted to forget work and read the papers, he’d answer my questions and offer another salient point. He stood for hours beside me at the photocopier. To all of you, thank you. You have been the stars of my Southern Cross as I navigated this long and precipitous academic journey.

Finally, I would like to dedicate this dissertation to my family – Trevor, Jessica, Mark, Amelia and Matthew Oberhardt who have been tremendously encouraging and supportive of me, always. 1

Chapter One

THE ART MUSEUM: IT ALL DEPENDS ON WHOSE FRAME YOU USE TO LOOK AT IT!

It is an important and popular fact that things are not always as they seem. For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much - the wheel, New York, wars and so on - whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man - for precisely the same reasons. (Adams 1979, p. 119)

An anomaly, a series of contradictory “facts,” unverified assumptions, a puzzle, an uncharted area.

Douglas Adams in The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy insinuates that being intelligent depends on whose frame you use to look at things. This is where my study begins; with the recognition that our perception of art museums depends very much on whose frame you use to look at it. Academic discourses that position the art museum in the center of the frame (having achieved so much - paintings, New York, cultural imperialism and so on) may not be the only way to look at, and know, the art museum. This storehouse of iconic objects and imagery is not just an artifact in the province of those interested in art. It exists, though certainly in contrary ways, in the 2

lives of many people. I will argue that the art museum has a life in popular culture that has previously been ignored and/or misconstrued. Academic discourses have been pre-occupied with the moral, political and social dilemmas associated with the art museum appropriating from the realms of popular culture. However, by framing the debate in these terms, they have failed to see how popular culture has, most enterprisingly, been appropriating the art museum for years!

The notion of a frame as something that imposes a fixed border is central to the thinking in this dissertation. A frame, in these terms, is a closed system. Postmodern discourse has retheorized the nature of language and highlighted the increasing difficulty of defining the limits of language (Derrida 1979). A frame can have multiple signifiers and multiple references. What constitutes its meaning depends on how it is constructed in, and of, the endless contrivances of these signifiers and references. To this extent words such as construct, perspective, context, structure, hyperframe, lens, window, expectations, discourse, rules and paintings are not simply interchangeable synonyms but part of a genus of words that define the imposition of a border; where we stop viewing at an arbitrarily-imposed edge in the fallacious belief that there is nothing more to see. I justify the multiple uses of the frame metaphor as a means to deconstruct then reconstruct its meaning. In other words, the word frame is going to be used in multiple ways to deconstruct its closed system and to set the stage for its reconstruction throughout the rest of the dissertation. Proximity can overwhelm. When we step back from navel-gazing upon the art museum, we can see art museums everywhere – on the TV news, in 3

interviews and tabloid trivia, in films, advertisements and rock videos, on postcards and billboards, in buses and books, in cyberspace and many of the other nooks and crannies of daily existence. These representations may not be real art museums per se, but they provide the means by which most people come to know and partake of art museums. The authority of the art museum’s voice is determined not by its bricks and mortar presence but by how others construct it in everyday discourses of the milieu of life. The voice of the art museum itself is framed in the ways other voices talk it into being. To date, the art museum has enjoyed a privileged cultural position. It has been a star in the movie of art history. However, the art museum in popular culture is not at the center of popular culture – it is both metaphorically and literally a bit player in a bigger movie of life. An inflated pre-occupation with the museum’s pre-eminence has given it an inflated “power” in terms of both the perceived good it can do and the evil it can inflict. Constructed in the mundane and everyday, it is neither a beacon of hope and enlightenment nor dead and irrelevant. It is part of the physical and social landscape. When we can view the art museum in these terms, we can also envisage a new frame for art education where people don’t learn about visual culture; they live in one. So, instead of viewing popular culture from the central position of the art museum as it occurs in academic discourses, this study steps out of the established frames of the discipline, and investigates how the museum is located in popular culture. In this frame, I will establish the nature of this new or uncharted construction of the art museum. I propose that there are some similarities between how the art museum is constructed in academic 4

discourse and popular culture: it is physically impressive, culturally important and pedagogically significant in the ways of constructing identity. However, the attributes of the art museum acquire a different value in these two different contexts. The institutional authority of the art museum in recent academic discourse is viewed as authoritarian and elitist; an instrument of power and oppression. Such a perspective sees “marginalized groups” as a variable in a cause and effect relationship: the art museum displays images/objects which cause some people to be marginalized. Likewise, to suggest that by bringing the artifacts of popular culture into the art museum it will empower people, is equally absurd. As professional art museum workers ponder how to give marginalized others a voice and equal access to the museum, they fail to see that there is really no need – the people have constructed their own art museums in the realms of popular culture. In this popular sphere, I will argue, art museums satisfy the need for the sacred. People have for centuries invested power in certain mythic objects and images and the art museum, as cultural artifact, has become a mythic object in its own right. I own a piece of the art museum, so to speak, when I pin a postcard of the Museum of Modern Art above my desk at work. The core position of this dissertation is about breaking the frame in order to reconcile and reconstruct new frames through which to view the art museum. This means de-skilling ourselves – starting a new sense-making venture with new tools and objects. To do this, I propose the following as a heuristic device to frame the study. By no means am I suggesting that all 5 things I discuss will fit neatly into this structure. It is not stable nor are its boundaries equally weighted. The lines are arbitrary as in all frames.

Museum in Popular Culture

profane sacred

erotic sensual bodies as objects romantic love

Museum Demonized Museum Deified

elitist elitist exclusive inclusive because of its aspirational and inspirational role

authoritarian authoritative an agent of oppression a moral voice

Museum in Academic Discourse

Figure 1: The Heuristic Device

The Heuristic Device is constructed around two central axes. The vertical axis is locational and positions the art museum along a continuum from the realms of Popular Culture to its more traditional home as part of the Academy. Intersecting with this axis is a more emotive continuum that marks the way we feel about art museums, from deifying them to demonizing them. I propose that when we deify the art museum it becomes sacred; represents sensual and romantic love; is elitist in an inclusive way 6 because of its aspirational and inspirational role; and has a moral and authoritative voice. When we demonize the art museum it becomes profane; eroticizes and objectifies the body; is elitist in a way that is exclusive; and through its authoritarian profile acts as an agent of oppression. There is, however, a third axis that cuts diagonally across the other axes. This axis is deliberately unnamed. It acts merely to disrupt our perceptions for it is as wrong to suggest that the Museum in Popular Culture is always deified as it is to say that the Museum in Academic Discourse is always demonized or vice versa. It is for this reason that the third diagonal axis breaks the expectations, the rules, the frames. It causes some doubt, some dispute on the boundaries. Within this theoretical space of discovery I address four frames that are constructed around the axes. They fit into the scheme something like this: 7

Museum in Popular Culture

profane sacred

FRAME 3

erotic sensual bodies as objects romantic love

Museum Demonized Museum Deified

elitist elitist exclusive inclusive because of its aspirational and FRAME 2 FRAME 1 inspirational role

authoritarian authoritative an agent of oppression a moral voice

Museum in Academic Discourse

FRAME 4

Figure 2: Positioning the Four Frames

The first frame is not, as we are trained to expect, in the top left hand corner. It takes the opposite position on the bottom right side of the heuristic device. Frame 1 is the frame of Art History and exists, on first inspection, more closely aligned to the location of the Academy. It is interesting to start at this frame though, because it is cut by the third axis and becomes contrary. If we look again at Frame 1 and realign our vision we see that it is equally accessed or owned in the mundane spaces of popular culture as it is by art historians. Throughout the dissertation, I use a metaphor of the painting to represent the art historical paradigm and the art museum in this frame. It 8

seems the most appropriate word from the genus of frame because of so many people’s immediate reaction to the word “frame” is as an elaborate gold frame around a painting. I mentally envisage the gilt-edged surrounds of a painting when I hear the word. And Art History has been gilt-edged. It has been deified both by academics who have waxed lyrically about the skills of the artists; the beauty evoked by the painting; the spiritual value of art to humankind and so on. Equally, though, the painting has been deified by common and often uneducated folk. They don’t speak of chiaroscuro and/or the Renaissance but they marvel at the magical representation of immortality and human life that the painting can also represent. Frame 1 and the painting have been made sacred. Frame 2 is positioned squarely in the ivory-towered domain of a demonizing academic discourse. This is the frame of New Museology, a fledgling academic discipline of the 1970s, 80s and 90s that has shifted the focus from an art historical adoration of the painting to a postmodernist critique of institutions. In this frame, the art museum is demonized. It is seen as a hyperframe which imposes a particular mastercode for seeing the painting. The art museum is varyingly portrayed as racist, sexist, homophobic, colonial and elitist and as an institution indoctrinating its citizens into the ideologies of a wealthy, ruling class. In many of the academic writings idiosyncratic of Frame 2, the art museum is portrayed as teetering on the brink of ruin and although the new museologists acknowledge the images/objects and spaces beyond the art museum, they are somehow fearful of it. The contrary, unnamed axis holds back the vast oppositional wash of popular culture. 9

You’ll recognize the commonplace locales of home, shop, cinema, street, cafe, tourist attraction and stadium delineated by Frame 3. It sits above the other frames in the Heuristic Device not because it is socially more important but just because of it’s sheer size and number. It sits in the position of the postage stamp and of the heart. In the realms of Frame 3, the art museum is special and sacred. It is within the boundaries of this frame that Chapter 3 develops. I scrutinize the discourses of the art museum not through texts displayed by the art museum but rather through how the museum itself is represented and talked about in contemporary society. I examine the art museum as represented in everyday popular films to show how its cultural representations are brought to life by multiple voices. The centrality of the academic voice is lost. Finally, with Frame 4, our expectations of the frame are disrupted once again. We anticipate that Frame 4 will be in the empty box next to Frame 3. Instead it sits below the other frames somewhat adrift. It breaks away from the frame. However, as our training demands to make sense of it floating beyond the model, we start to read it as a title to the frames. When we step outside the boundaries of our discipline of origin we risk losing our importance, our competence, our centrality, our right to name and give titles. However, when we step outside our discipline we see the world and the trappings of our discipline, differently. To view the art museum as existing in popular culture is significantly different than knowing the art museum from within the academic discourse. This fourth frame acknowledges the paradigms outlined in Frames 1, 2 and 3 but sees none of those frames as 10

mutually exclusive. Therefore, there is no need for them to be reconciled or integrated or to view one as more dominant than the others. In fact, there is no need for the art museum to be reconciled or integrated or viewed as more dominant than any other cultural artifact. I work towards viewing the art museum in terms of this “big picture” (Frame 4) outside existing borders and yet even to talk of culture as “a picture” is to re-introduce the borders and notions of a frame with a finite

boundary. Perhaps one can never actually do away with frames as this is the epistemology that informs our way of referencing the world. What we can strive for though, is the continued deconstruction of prevailing frames for the purpose of creating new ones: each attempt resisting odious and dominant world views and creating fresh meanings, identities and fairer ways of life. In the shift from a relatively static culture to a global, corporate and electronic culture which constantly invents and reinvents itself, we can come to know the art museum differently.

Qualify, propose, justify.

In an ongoing struggle for supremacy over Nature, humankind has searched for a foolproof formula to decode the meaning of life, and created, for all intents and purposes, a cultural lineage of “gods,” both secular and religious, to worship. Roland Barthes writes in Mythologies of the human belief that “[t]here is a single secret to the world, and this secret is held in one word; the universe is a safe of which humanity seeks the combination” (1984, 11

p. 69). In religious doctrine, the single answer has been espoused in the concept of a “God.” For the twentieth-century rationalist, however, the answer is more keenly sought in science and in mathematical formulae. From Einstein to Hawking, the twentieth-century scientific “genius” has been called upon to reduce the complexity of the universe to an equation, a logical number or series of numbers that unlocks the mystery of who and what we are. Contemporary science fiction writer, Douglas Adams, is cynical of this

process, though, as he facetiously reveals the answer to “Life, the Universe and Everything” as “forty-two” (1979, p. 135) in his cult novel The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Numerical salvation, he intimates, is mere folly. Others have sought the answers to life in objects. I am immediately reminded of the romantic legends of King Arthur and his quest for the Holy Grail, so embodied by the pursuit of an object. He searched for a chalice, purportedly the cup from which Jesus drank at the Last Supper. The mythic chalice gained added credence when Joseph of Arimathea, kneeling at the crucifixion, caught “in the golden vessel . . . part of the blood of our Lord Jesus Christ, which none but a perfect man might ever see” (Cox & Jones 1871, p. 168). This quest for an object that only a “perfect man” can see is what interests me here in a study of the pedagogy of the modern art museum. Whether Arthur and his court are historical fact or fiction is insignificant. What is intriguing is the repeated historical narratives that make some everyday objects more special than others; and position some people, mainly “perfect men,” as the natural inheritors of power. From the Holy Grail to the “cups of Rhea and Demeter, of Serapis, and of the milkwoman or gardener’s wife in Hindu folk-lore, the lotos of Harp-i-chruti, the jar of Aristomenes, the 12 divining cup of Joseph, the ivory ewer of Solomon, the goblet of Taliesin” (Cox & Jones 1871, p. 49) miraculous stories have been woven around seemingly utilitarian objects. In this dissertation I want to unravel, at least in part, by whom, why and how these stories are perpetrated and what sacred role a twentieth-century art museum plays in furthering these myths. Barthes points to the “‘fatality’ of the sacrosanct which man (sic.) cannot yet do without” (1984, p. 70) and our deep-seated need to infuse the mundane and ordinary with something special and magical, in short, to enshroud the everyday in myth. He writes of the “euphoric security” (1984, p. 70) that myth sustains in people when the social, cultural, historical and ideological aspects of life are comfortingly seen as a matter of course. Myth, he states, “has the task of giving an historical intention a natural justification, and making contingency appear eternal” (1984, p. 142). The starting point in this dissertation is to look at how an object such as an art museum functions in the loop of mythmaking. How does the art museum confer a mythic bearing on objects and images, at odds to historical reality? How can it transform form into meaning? How do art museums help formulate alliances between powerful, and not so powerful cultural groups, promote specific ideologies and define identity? Already, the language I use begins to anthromorphize and demonize the art museum. It is, after all, an insensate object. The art museum per se does nothing but exist and it is the human discourses that surround and move through the art museum which invest the lifeless walls with a “voice” of authority. The art museum cannot speak but we speak about the art museum. We make films about it, write about it, take photos of ourselves in 13 front of it, talk about it and teach about it. In those images and words we create, the value of the bricks of the museum are made special, assured a greater significance than the bricks of the garage, or the factory, or the store. The art museum is deified and all the forms enshrined within its spaces, become profound. Each work of art has a history, a geography, a chemistry and a morality, but most notably, once in situ, its assumes a state of normality. This is the way it is, so to speak - herein lies the answer.

However, delineating the parameters of the art museum or even defining the concrete conditions of its existence are problematic. The art museum has changed “shape” in the ages of mechanical and technological reproduction. Its bricks have been flattened on paper, celluloid and plastic and diffused into virtual spaces. The relationship between flesh and space has been irrevocably changed as one no longer needs to attend the actual built structure of the art museum to know the art museum. It is repeated again and again in our daily lives – in movies, magazines, postcards, music videos, advertisements, television shows, on the World Wide Web and so on. This progressive appropriation of the art museum into different forms of media has had little to do with presenting an intellectual debate about art and more to do with resonating with the qualities desired most by consumers – status, glamour, success, intelligence, good taste and perhaps even salvation. The art museum (and art images/objects) has been woven into a wide range of simulated contexts, providing a cultural frame to make characters and goods look enticing and by extension, transform ourselves and our lives. Key to this discussion is the realization that this new museum space is, i n fact, a product in its own right. This shift impacts upon our way of 14

understanding the art museum and the ways in which it is integrated into the processes of desire and communication in a consumer society. No matter how integral the art museum is in the history of our visual experience, it is only so because it fits a political strategy of uniqueness. Take, for example, the facade of the museum itself which provides a rich text of symbolic detail. Its large scale, materials and complexity make it stand out from the surrounding architecture like a painting featured upon an easel. The striking features

make for good copy on T-Shirts, postcards and coffee table books. Museums are assuming star quality. Again, I anthromorphize, but some museums have become so famous that we know them by their “close friend” nicknames - the Met (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), MoMA (Museum of Modern Art, New York), the Getty (Getty Museum of Art, Los Angeles) alongside Cher, Madonna, Roseanne, Oprah and Mr. T. The pedagogical implications of such an understanding are considerable. People search for meaning in their lives through their acquisitions and interactions with cultural objects and narratives. What do we culturally purchase when we go to the art museum? What objects do we seek in our lives with the passion of King Arthur and why? How do these images/objects impact on how we know ourselves and the world around us? How do they impinge upon our actions and behaviors? What lessons do we learn just from sitting on the steps of an art museum – or from Rocky Balboa running up them as he did in the Rocky movies? What does it mean when we pin a postcard of the Guggenheim above our desk at work? How does art education position images and objects in the social world? How do we currently teach students to find meaning in images/objects and to use them 15

in their daily lives? What critical conceptual tools, if any, do we afford students to engage with the proliferation of images/objects in their world? In this dissertation I argue not to raze art museums but to adjust our fixed view of them; to find pleasure in them certainly, but also to see the discursive myths that function to maintain them in the lives of most people. The art museum is an object but how we come to know it, talk about it and engage with it is consequential to the way we act in everything from dressing, buying, loving, dying, working, playing and interacting with others. As I stated before, we don’t even have to step inside an art museum to be aware of the values and practices it extols. We watched people transact in a gallery on Seinfeld last night or in the latest advertisement for Kodak. Art educators need to constantly refigure the museum in terms of this broader culture, to critically analyze the contradictory and naturalized assumptions that it tacitly promotes. Let us return for a moment to Barthes’ notion of our need for a single answer to life. I spoke previously of the “genius” scientist reducing the world to a single equation. Parallel to this phenomenon in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was the “genius” artist whose ingenuity with pigment created a fundamental reduction of the world to a two-dimensional canvas. Like Einstein’s theory of relativity, the masterpiece painting provided “all the Gnostic themes: the unity of nature, the ideal possibility of a fundamental reduction of the world . . . the age-old struggle between a secret and an utterance, the idea that total knowledge can only be discovered all at once” (Barthes 1984, p. 69). From within the paradigm of the camera obscura, the painting endeavored to reduce life to a single, arrestable moment of truth. 16

By controlling the gaze upon the painting (and I use the term “painting” generically throughout the dissertation to mean art images and objects displayed in an art museum) you can effectively frame a view of art history, and subsequently life, to the exclusion of all that exists beyond the frame. The canvas becomes an island, shrinking the world into a small contained space. As Philip Fisher suggests, “The island miniaturizes the social and technological relation to the earth in terms of a single individual’s relation to the amount of space that can be dominated by his own will” (1991, p. 218). Meyer Schapiro offers a further observation in his essay, “The Apples of Cézanne” where he argues that “[Cézanne’s] still life is a model world that he has carefully set up on the isolating supporting table, like the table of the strategist who mediates imaginary battles between the toy forces he has arranged on his variable terrain” (1978, p. 27). Paintings as shrunken island/table top worlds cull and control the world. To own and display some of these particular views of the world, becomes, in its own way, a kind of obsessive holy Grail. The painting has been deified not only by academic “priests” who tend it in the “temple” but also by a broader public, looking for life’s answers. In more recent decades, an academic discourse has emerged that shifts the frame to reveal the painting on a museum wall and as part of an institutionalized system. New Museology, as this discipline has been called, draws attention to the fact that paintings don’t exist in isolation but are displayed in an elaborate architecture known as an art museum. Without the frame of the museum, the “value” of the painting is not assured. Within these discourses, academics and critics have attacked the art museum as 17 exhibiting not only paintings but class based, sexist, racist and homophobic prejudices. The art museum has been demonized as an ideological apparatus of Western, patriarchal concerns and exposed as a paradigm of institutional power. Artists too, have worked to critically deconstruct the art museum: satirizing the process of museum display from within its boundaries; working beyond its walls in the community or in natural settings; using their own bodies; or literally projecting their objections onto the museum surface.

Paradoxically, the most strident critics of the art museum have become its new wave of “priests” and art becomes more inaccessible to those outside than ever. However, in my dissertation, I want to extend the frame even further and suggest that the art museum itself doesn’t exist in isolation. It is but an artifact in a wide-ranging culture. It gains its social credibility not from magically-imbued objects within its walls but by the power vested in it by the vast populations and texts outside its walls. The art museum may play a fundamental role in determining what is “high” culture but that role is paradoxically reinforced and maintained from within the texts of “low” culture. Specifically, this study will move beyond a macro-analysis of “great museums” and into the micro-realms of everyday popular culture. It will add more dimensions to the conventional boundaries of museological debate on visual culture, beyond discussions on paintings or on paintings in museum contexts. I use the metaphor of a frame (acknowledging the art museum as the ultimate metaphor of the frame and visa versa) to structure my study. I envisage looking through the viewfinder of a camera with my hand 18

controlling a retracting zoom lens. I aim the camera at our visual culture and move the lens from a close-up focus on the art object; zoom out to reveal the object in the frame of the art museum; zoom out again to show the museum as sign within the metonymic and metaphoric frames of popular culture; and finally position the art museum in a wide-angle frame as but one small but significant artifact in a social and political landscape of myth, ideology and urban existence.

However, finding out about how we represent and know art museums affords little benefit if it is not followed by a process of practical amendment. As I stated earlier, the intent here is not to demonize museums but to change how we apprehend them; to explicate the myths surrounding them in a way that offers an opportunity to experience museum culture from sacred, critical and pleasurable perspectives. Art education (and by art education, I refer to art education in both school and museum contexts) needs to offer an expanded view of visual culture and in the final chapter, I address such issues as the current proliferation of visual imagery that soaks into all realms of contemporary life; images and objects as everyday material commodities that we use to construct and display our identities; shared world media representations of identity sameness as opposed to a continued pre- occupation with otherness; shifting boundaries between traditional arts disciplines in an era of multimedia; and critical strategies museums can use to remap our art heritage and the past with the images and objects of the larger cultural milieu of the now. 19

Method of inquiry.

This project combines methodological strategies, theories and concepts from neo Marxist, structuralist, poststructuralist, feminist and postmodern theory in an attempt to provide critical perspectives on the art museum as a cultural and social phenomena. Inspired by the proponents of cultural studies who provide salient insights into contemporary society, these writings

offer a subjective critique of the art museum and, hopefully, some inspiration for a new vision of art museums and art education. The analysis is textually- oriented in the images/objects it studies, interrogating a sample of representations of art museums in popular film texts. In particular, the analysis will examine how these representations produce a range of positions, pleasures and identities within diverse, multicultural societies. Joe L. Kincheloe (1996) in Horizon Receding: Critical Research in Science Education provided a pragmatic profile of the “critical” in critical research that I found very useful in structuring my study. Elucidating his summary from the social theories of the Frankfurt School (Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse), Genealogy (Foucault), Poststructuralist Deconstruction (Derrida) and Postmodernist inquiry (Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard, Ebert), Kincheloe propounds that critical research needs to meet five fundamental 20 requirements:

1) it rejects positivistic notions of rationality, objectivity, and truth.

2) it attains an awareness of its own value commitments, the value commitments of others, and the values promoted by dominant culture.

3) it cultivates an awareness of the social and political construction of professional consciousness.

4) it attempts to uncover those aspects of the social order that undermine the pursuit of critical egalitarian and democratic goals.

5) it is always conceived in relation to practice. Critical research is never disinterested - it exists to improve practice.

In the first point, Kincheloe argues that the methodological approaches of empirical researchers fail to escape the boundaries of their own ideological assumptions. Positivism assumes that there is an unequivocal “truth” and we can find that “truth” if we follow the scientific rules of the empirical paradigm. The critical researcher, though, challenges such rational, modernistic notions of a defined body of “truth” asserting that there is no one supreme view of life, but a multitude of filtered, constructed views of life seen through the peculiar eyes of each knower. Academic art museum discourse has been guilty of promoting an essentialist world view, one that centers the art museum, and the wider public has traditionally been left out of that frame. This dissertation functions to re-define the rigid, academic cadre 21

that restrains our way of knowing the art museum and to broaden the narrowly-defined focus of positivism to include local, subjective, anecdotal and autobiographical strategies. In this way, the writing is subjective and challenges the unstated assumptions which permeate much conventional “objective” research. I will draw on my own personal experiences and offer anecdotes in the writing of this document. I also use non-traditional academic sources such as glossy magazines, letterbox advertising, novels and online reviews in my writing. Within the domain of critical inquiry, Kincheloe goes on to suggest that we must be aware of our own set of assumptions and values, the learned filters and frames that we bring to everything we know, and to juxtapose these personal values against those ascribed by the dominant social order. I am an academic who researches art museums. Institutional affirmation has come easily to me. Studying the art museum is studying the cultural niche in which I most comfortably fit. However, I am also a person who watches television, likes football and reads glossy magazines at the hairdresser. When I ask myself the question: through what “frame” do I view the art museum?, then there seems to be more than one response. Predominantly, because of my career choices, I see the art museum through the lens of an academic discourse. I also know it through representations in the media and through administrating the funding for art as a government consultant. However, if I really think about it, I also view the art museum through the frame of a mirror that shows me and an art museum reflected together. I enjoy the association. I silently know the answers to, “How will people perceive me if I tell them I go to art museums?” and “What does it say about me to others 22

that I wear a T-Shirt from the Guggenheim Museum of Art?”. I accept that my “truth” as researcher is a “temporal truth” and depends on my own personal expectations of the art museum to frame myself. The critical theorist, though, must believe that boundaries of experience and thought can be dislodged to reveal new ways of seeing and to pursue questions that previously were unable to be articulated. For example, it took a major linguistic shift in perception for art critics to turn their attention away

from what was present in cultural artifacts on display to discover what was also implicit, when you could comprehend an absence. The male artist’s self portrait reveals a swaggering, self-styled radical but equally hides a system that denied access to women in the Salons and galleries. Modernist art has been well served by research that promotes the myths through which it can be consistently misread such as “only men make good artists.” Crystallizing our ways of seeing art conventions and operations have corralled social, economic and political ideologies into an impenetrable frame. It is only when we can conceive of re-defining or breaking the academic frame that we can view art and museums as multi-accentual and not frozen in meaning. Critical theory has also provided new ways of understanding power and, in particular, the way in which we are all complicit in its structures. Gramsci’s (1957), theory of hegemony dispelled the notion of power as a monolith enforced from above. He suggested that power emanated not from some demonic despot but rather from a system of values and beliefs supportive of the ruling classes that permeated throughout the whole of society. Althusser (1971), continued this thinking, turning a structuralist lens on Marxism to reveal that the central function of ideology was to reproduce 23

the existing relations of production embedded in the institutions of “ideological state apparatuses” such as the Church, schools and, by extension, an artworld. His notion of “interpellation” as a process of discursive exchange between a person and a cultural agent is integral to any discussion on pedagogy and is particularly relevant in an era of media proliferation tacitly coercing individuals into accepting the ideologies carried by these forms of representations. Foucault, shaped a vivid metaphor of power as a “capillary

form of existence . . . the point where power reaches into the very grain of individuals, touches their bodies and inserts itself into their actions and attitudes, their discourses, learning processes and everyday lives” (1980, p. 39). In this dissertation, I premise my study on a belief that there is no one unified power bloc or conspiratorial museum system to blame or overthrow. It is rather a tangled skein of complicitous human interaction that promotes the cultural authority of the art museum. Only by looking beyond the art museum and into the society that has created art museums are we to find answers as to why people need to own, display and revere some images and objects over others. Finally, Kincheloe highlights one of the most important tenets of critical research when he speaks of putting theory into practice. He suggests that we explore the world for the purpose of “exposing . . . injustice, developing practical ways to change it, and identifying sites and strategies by which transformation can be established” (1996, p. 1). Theory can provide the intellectual vision for change but ultimately it is, in itself, “totalizing.” Without, moving theory from the realms of paper egalitarianism and into day to day praxis, it remains what Eagleton describes as “a kind of minority art 24

form,” and “a modish substitute for political life” (1996, p. 206). Theory reflects on “what is,” but unless we actually find pragmatic strategies for “what might be,” it remains a futile pursuit. The advantage of critical theory is its willingness to confront the moral issues, to consider the political and to listen to multiple voices. I will explore ways that the theoretical research in this document can be transformed into practical strategies. In particular, I offer a process for renegotiating and reconciling the frame in an advancing praxis. Art classrooms and museum education programs can provide the means for a contentious society, one that acknowledges conflict as part of a vibrant and healthy democracy and one that actively works towards change.

Re-viewing art education.

The first substantive act for art educators (both art teachers and museum educators) of the future is to acknowledge that the contest of cultural politics will take place predominantly in the image system. It is not a co-incidence that some of the most wealthy people in the Western world today such as Bill Gates, Ted Turner and Rupert Murdoch are those who own and control visual production and display. Part of the challenge is to actually unveil this “picture” for a public that lives, so enmeshed in a visual world, that they often fail to consciously acknowledge the growing proliferation of images that have moved into their personal and professional spaces. This image system, and it is an organized and authoritative system of media images, is all pervasive, and yet many art educators remain blind to its existence. They 25

continue to faithfully uphold the adoration and consummation of the art historical paradigm which promotes the painting as the only worthy image to gaze upon to the exclusion of all other forms of imagery. In the twentieth century, art education has clearly been established around a high culture/low culture distinction (Efland 1990). The idea of competence in visual arts became synonymous with being taught about it. The art student has come to perceive of images in terms of how art educators have described them to be. The educated spectator then, schooled in the cultural codes necessary to decipher works of art within the specific history of artistic tradition, assumes an “aesthetic disposition” and the mantle of “cultural superiority.” Such a pedagogical system recognizes a deep partisanship, a class-and-culture cleavage along differentiated income-and- education lines that implicates different groups of people and marks off special niches for them. The challenge for art education is not to isolate preferred parts of the culture but to engage in the culture at large, to seep across borders, to move from images of the past to the present, from the museum painting to the commercial advertisement, from the self-created to the mass produced, from the sacred to the profane, from the what to the who and why. Now that these traditional frames are disintegrating in postmodern times, there is a need for a new theoretical manifesto, one that acknowledges art in varying terms: as a sacred object, as human conversation across time and place, as a site of conflict and disagreement, as a conduit to the senses, and as a material commodity every bit as commercial as the products of mass 26

culture. Paul Duncum takes up the latter point when he advocates a semiotic view of culture in the teaching of art education. He writes:

A semiotic view of culture offers a foundation wherein visual images are regarded as ordinary material commodities, which are as common as everyday speech, and as significant as the way the great majority of students construct their view of themselves and the world. (1997, p. 71)

The strategy of critical analysis, of educating the young consumer to critique all visual images without favor, is important for it is through these representations that we determine our social worth and position ourselves in relation to others. By examining images, not just in terms of a formalist art critique, but through the content of the subject matter and with a view to the interests of those who created them, we come to understand that images are not neutral but the mirror of humanity. All images are created by people (whether they work within the established artworld or in the production of popular texts) towards certain ends and these ends range along a continuum from socially considerate to unequivocally self-interested. If we remove the differentiation between the fine art image and all other images, the notion of superior and inferior becomes conflated into a space where a kaleidoscope of images are both illusory and pleasurable and yet, equally seen as commodities warranting scrutiny. It is difficult, having been raised in the Age of the Book to really comprehend the perceptual abilities of young children who have been engaging in visual technologies virtually since birth. A recent baby-sitting experience brought this home to me as a twelve year old and a six year old simultaneously engaged with two television sets, a CD player, a video and a 27

computer game for eight continuous hours. This new kind of cognition provides changed ways of knowing and communicating and the challenge for the art educator is to develop strategies for critical interactivity with the abundant and immediate image system. One thing is for certain, and that is the epistemological paradigm is shifting from the written text to the visual text. Also relevant is the growing ability of children to be absorbed in a number of visual texts viewed at high speed and/or simultaneously. They are a generation capable of crossing borders unconsciously and expeditiously. Borders, we must remember, are arbitrarily established. Giroux (1992) in Border Crossings: Cultural Workers and the Politics of Education argues for a critical pedagogy that challenges boundaries of knowledge, recognizes the limits inherent in cultural discourses and offers the potential for multiple references of cultural codes. He talks of border crossers, “moving in and out of borders constructed around coordinates of difference and power” (p. 29). Such a term evokes images of risk-takers and mavericks. I think of bounty hunters tracking runaway bad guys across county lines, illegal immigrants silently crossing foreign borders at night to avoid detection and cross-dressers muddying gender expectations. However, my immediate reaction may not be the most useful way of considering the idea of border crossing. If we stop thinking in such either/or terms – good guys/bad guys, legal/illegal, male/female – border crossing can be viewed more in terms of speed and blurring, a bleeding of color into the fabric of an endless white cloth. It is in this metaphoric manifestation that we come closest to a vision of art education that is part of the fabric of life not something discreet and separate from it. It provides greater scope for envisaging accelerated, inextricable and 28

web-like interactions with the images/objects that occur contiguously in the media, communities and exhibiting cultures. Giroux goes on to extend his argument for border pedagogy addressing the institutions which constrain disciplinary knowledge.

Although the borders of existing disciplinary knowledge do need to be challenged and refigured, it is also crucial to recognize that knowledge formation is . . . both “the conditions of institutions and the effects of institutions.” . . . . border pedagogy must take up the dual task of not only creating new objects of knowledge but also addressing how inequalities, power and human suffering are rooted in basic institutional structures. (1992, p.29)

His statement that both the conditions and effects of institutions influence how we gain knowledge suggests that museum culture is not innocent edification or entertainment but the representation of thoroughly ideological artifacts bound up with political rhetorics and agendas. Indeed, this is so, but are institutions such as art museums really calling the shots in most people’s lives and are all political rhetorics and agendas necessarily negative? It is important to understand that art museums do offer master narratives. By the very nature of display, they cannot avoid taking a political stance. Certainly, in recent times, as museums strive to maximize their audience in the era of economic rationalism, a vast number of discourses, ideological positions and narrative strategies have been employed in an attempt to offer a little something for everyone. By and large, though, those exhibitions have still functioned from within a much wider socially-accepted construct of what is perceived to be morally right and wrong. Museums are a part of a social habitat. They are conceived, designed, built, managed, cleaned, 29

bedecked, guarded and visited by human beings. Rather than viewing the art museum as an instrument of institutional oppression, it is far more beneficial to view it in terms of reproducing the fundamental practices, conflicts and rituals of the society in which it exists. Culture is a spectrum of myths, symbols and objects and there is a need to adopt a wide range of perspectives to understand and interpret cultural phenomena. When we merely demonize and talk in terms of “resistance”

against institutional structures, then cultural separatism and us and them binaries continue. After all, learning depends crucially on some tacit consensus of values between teachers and taught. Despite our unease with institutional authority, I believe the art museum can provide ethical and moral pedagogies, ones that expose its own contradictions and paradoxes. By acknowledging its authority and contradictions self-consciously, the art museum can be part of a process of dialogue on social practices, conflicts and rituals and the challenge is to achieve pedagogies that will support students’ explorations of these complex issues. Art educators have the opportunity to lead a project of discovery where students explore both the human past and the sensory world of new technologies, alternative forms of representation and the present human condition.

Related knowledge and research.

In this section, I outline, support and contest the key research that frames the art museum and which is relevant to my study. I present material on 30

pedagogy and authority, discourse and museums, and popular culture as three discreet areas and at times, they are discreet fields of knowledge. However, more often than not these areas intersect, interrelate and are synchronous and it is only due to the limitations of a two-dimensional page that I represent them as separate entities.

Pedagogy and authority.

If we are to remove the art museum from the frame of historically- situated, European (and American?), male-authored pedagogies then it becomes necessary to examine the boundaries imposed by theorists not only on the museum itself but on the notion of pedagogy, as well. A strange sounding and abstract word, it rarely, if ever, occurs in everyday conversations, but it has become a integral concept in academic research intent on discovering how we come to teach and learn things in the world. Somewhat naturally, the greatest body of writing on this subject has developed in education-based disciplines and has traditionally focused on teaching and learning in classroom settings. Notions of pedagogy, though, have shifted from a tight focus on the classroom teacher to a belief that teaching and learning takes place not only in educational institutions but within larger social contexts, practices and structures, as well. Within these conceptual limits, the political consequences for knowledge and identity production are explored. 31

The definition of pedagogy as “the science of teaching” is the legacy of a late nineteenth century paradigm shift towards scientific rationalism. As Efland states, “Science had begun to acquire the same kind of canonical authority once ascribed to philosophy and theology . . .” (1990, p. 164). Scientific discourses, marked by their claims of indisputable truths and clearly defined sets of criteria, positioned reality as something completely objective and occurring externally to the individual. By delineating the practice of teaching as a “science,” pedagogy, by association, implied clearly-defined parameters, correct methods, rationality and certainty. Good teaching, it was proposed, was achievable when the teacher denied their subjectivity to remain totally objective. This formula for teaching constructs pedagogy as a relation of control, in which the “teacher,” as authority, determines the ends, means and content of teaching/learning. Pedagogy in this realm is mono-dimensional and mono- directional and fails to address knowledge production as distinct from dissemination and consumption. Such perceptions of pedagogy have regularly reappeared throughout the century: in the 1910s as the social efficiency movement; in the 1920s as the scientific movement; and in the 1970s as the accountability movement (Efland, 1990). Most recently, such views have been re-ignited in the late 80s and 90s through the writings of critics such as Alan Bloom (1988) and E. D. Hirsch Jnr. (1988) who believe there is a quantifiable amount of knowledge that our schools should be teaching. Likewise, oppositional voices to such rigid, pedagogical intent were expressed throughout the century and most recently during the 1980s, in a 32

substantial body of research developed around the notion of a critical or radical pedagogy. David Lusted in his seminal paper, “Why Pedagogy?”, talks in terms of pedagogy as a transformative practice, a practice that places value away from the quantifiable content of learning and on to the “conscious- changing” processes through which knowledge is produced. “What pedagogy addresses is the process of production and exchange . . . the transformation of consciousness that takes place in the interaction of three agencies - the

teacher, the learner and the knowledge they together produce” (1986, p. 3). He goes on to suggest that “knowledge is produced not just at the researcher’s desk nor at the lectern, but in the consciousness, through the process of thought, discussion, writing, debate, exchange” (1986, p.4). The writings of Roger Simon (1987, 1989, 1992) Peter McLaren (1995), Henry Giroux (1989, 1993, 1996) and associates focus on transformation as a pedagogical concept exploring the moral and political dimensions in which learning takes place. Originating in neo-Marxist analysis, their work juxtaposes the relationship between politics, pedagogy and practice. Giroux and Simon re-defined pedagogy in these terms: “ . . . a deliberate attempt to influence how and what knowledge and identities are produced within and among particular sets of social relations” (1989, p. 222). In this frame, pedagogy is viewed as somewhat guileful and far-reaching. Later, Simon, more benignly states, “ . . . pedagogy is simultaneously talk about the details of what students and teachers might do together and the cultural politics such practices support” (1992, p. 57). In particular, critical pedagogues attempt to politicize the construction, production and reproduction of knowledge and emphasize the cause of identity politics of gender, class and ethnicity. They 33

argue strongly against authoritarian, content-based learning models such as the one described above, advocating the student’s cultural experiences and identities as central to classroom learning. To date, rhetorical debate around “pedagogy” has been trapped within these boundaries of traditional pedagogies versus progressive pedagogies. David Buckingham suggests that such polarization leads to either/or choices and a process of “mutual caricature” (1998, p. 3). The progressive approach is

“condemned for its liberal sloppiness, its lazy celebration of children’s experience, and ultimately for its rejection of teaching” whereas the traditional approach is depicted as “a form of educational terrorism, in which children are drilled and intimidated into acquiring arbitrary, disembodied fragments of information” (1998, p. 3). The binaries look something like this:

traditional progressive content process teacher-delivery child-centered rote learning discovery learning transmission interpretation social difference social equality eurocentric multi-cultural high culture popular culture hierarchical institution egalitarian community

Carmen Luke sees both feminist and critical pedagogues “buy[ing] into one side of a litany of conceptual dualisms” (1998, p. 32) with their aggressive 34

insistence on dismantling patriarchal models of knowledge and the subject. Buckingham adds that although the characterizations are not necessarily false, “it is doubtful whether ‘progressive’ or ‘traditional’ pedagogy actually exist in the terms in which they are typically described” (1988, p. 4). Certainly, from my educational experience, “empowering” working class or Aboriginal students is not as simple as stepping back and “giving students a voice” or exhibiting a display of Aboriginal artifacts in an otherwise Euro-centric

exhibition program. As Orner (1992) says, “giving” a voice implies another kind of paternalistic authority where despite an appearance of open dialogue, the “voice” of the teacher/artist/curator is still rarely challenged. The questions here become: Have authority and social justice come to be seen as two mutually exclusive and oppositional entities?; and, How can the two antithetical positions, namely an instructional and authoritative pedagogy and critical and self-reflexive inquiry, be made to intersect, to co- exist, to both offer something in the production of a fairer human relation? Many contemporary theorists in the 1990s continue the call for liberatory practice but often the change seems only to take place in the rhetoric. Patti Lather (1992) talks in terms of a post-critical pedagogy and sees the need to problematize critical pedagogy in postmodern terms. She insists that critical pedagogues also deconstruct their own practices in light of re-viewing and re- invigorating emancipatory pedagogy. Bill Green (1998) likewise focuses on the forms critical pedagogy can manifest in postmodern contexts with the emergence of information as a principle determinant of a metamedia literacy. He argues that “pedagogy is best understood as referring to the structured relationship between teaching and learning, as forms of social-discursive 35 practice” (1998, p. 179) and sees teaching and learning as interrelated but not necessarily “identical or isomorphic activities” (p. 179). Both Lather and Green argue for the development of a more dynamic interpretation of pedagogy. Teaching and learning are seen as complex, dynamic and continually shifting positions. However, it is Luke who offers me the most coherent critique on pedagogical theory and its failure to recognize the embodied difference that occurs in all exchanges. She argues that pedagogical authority in the cause of social justice is both unavoidable and, in fact, necessary when she writes:

Critical and feminist pedagogies, then, which attempt to transform top-down transmission models of knowledge by reconceptualizing the teacher role as ‘equal’ to the diversity of student differences, runs the risk of giving up authority over and claims to knowledge altogether, or masquerading as an ideal speech situation wherein all participants allegedly have equal speaking status and equally valued cultural and linguistic resources with which to make knowledge claims and seek consensual understandings of different knowledge claims. This position is theoretically untenable for two reasons: first, it contravenes feminism’s cherished claims of having a more fine- engrained and morally defensible conceptions of ontology and epistemology than patriarchal models; second, rendering differences as equally situated unifies them into a principle of sameness which contradicts [a] commitment to difference(s) of identity, location, history and experience. (1998, p. 32)

In short, Luke’s comments suggest you can’t have your cake and eat it too – you can’t make all voices equally valid and still embark on a moral and political agenda that promotes one critical vision of the world (even if it is anti-sexist, anti-racist and equitable) as better than other less sensitive or conciliatory views. The art museum falls uncomfortably in this bind. Castigated for its tyranny of authoritarian transmission, if it truly afforded a 36

voice to all world views, then the celebration of difference would depict the Ku Klux Klan and the African American slave experience with equal exposure and sympathy. Do we want the art museum to represent Nazi war memorabilia or graphic Holocaust imagery without making an authoritative moral and ethical value judgment? How can we teach about injustice, imperialism or exploitation without some authoritative benchmark or master narrative? Without such ethical benchmarks it is impossible to

develop criteria that distinguishes between morally justifiable or completely reprehensible positions. Certainly, images/objects are polysemic and open to a wide range of interpretations and it is important to expose students to the politics of making meaning. However, to suggest that the art museum disavow its authority in this process is problematic. A so-called absence of pedagogical authority positions the art museum as neutral and this is clearly fallacious no matter how hard it works to be multivocal and inclusive. Art museums do proffer value judgments simply by the act of putting images and objects on display and through how those images/objects are displayed. Luke argues that “[p]edagogy without a locus of authority . . . risks deceit: embodied difference and differential power access are camouflaged under a false pretense of allegedly equal subject positions” (1998, p.31). Museums do present ideological motifs and dichotomize the universe into good versus evil scenarios, yet equally, they incorporate a range of discourses, ideological positions, narrative strategies and utopian constructions which rarely coalesce into a pure and monolithic, ideological position. 37

There will always be a moral project associated with particular cultural processes and we should endeavor to evaluate the relative merits of such practices at all times. However, to trap the art museum inside an academic pedagogical debate that situates authority and master narratives as necessarily bad, and diversity and social justice in opposition to that authority, precludes a larger picture. It establishes parameters that inevitably demonize the art museum for either its inescapable authority or its impossible mission to show all cultures and members of a culture with an equal hand. Outside the academic discourses, in all of the randomly-chosen films I viewed for this study, the art museum provided a setting for cathartic and life-affirming moments in the lives of those who visited it. This taste for isolating objects in a museum, or cave, chapel or tomb for that matter, is a peculiarly human practice enacted over millenniums and one that, even in an era of mass reproduction and capitalism, enjoys a mythical quintessence achieved via its moral authority and its selection of certain images and objects over others.

Museums and discourse.

Museums are not just mineral objects but cultural institutions that function within a discourse; a discourse of images and words, contrived and coded in meaning. The authority of the art museum’s voice is very much determined by how others construct it in the social milieu: the voice of the art museum itself is authenticated in the ways other voices talk it into being. In this section I explore the paradox in New Museology discourses, the 38 theoretically informed critiques of the art museum which developed in the 1970s 80s and 90s. The critique initially was inspired by the post-Marxist writings of Foucault (Weil 1989, Hooper-Greenhill 1990, 1992, Crimp 1993, Bal 1996, Bennett 1998) and Gramsci (Bennett, 1986a, 1986b, 1990) and further broadened to include structuralism, post-structuralism and postmodernism. In these writings the art museum, invariably, is intellectualized in terms of being socially manipulative and politically oppressive. This seems at odds with the genuine respect and affection afforded art museums through representations in popular culture. Cultural theorist, Michel Foucault (1970, 1973, 1979, 1984), wrote extensively on the relationship between cultural institutions and the discursive production of subjectivities and I will use his notion of discourse – a systematic organization of written or visual language that encodes common values and meanings – as a definition throughout the dissertation. Foucault argued that identities are produced, regulated and most importantly, normalized, through institutionally sanctioned and legitimated discourses. Discourses tacitly endorse what institutions value and consequently classify not only images/objects and practices but social relations as well. He contends an insensate object such as an art museum can “teach” us how to behave and what to think, feel, believe, fear and desire. When we can identify the ways in which institutional discourses operate and render them “visible,” so to speak, the inherent power structures that they promote are also exposed to scrutiny and breach. 39

Stephen Weil from the Smithsonian Institute’s Hirshhorn Museum supports such a position as he describes the predicament in these museum- based terms:

The real issue, I think, is not how to purge the museum of values – that, in all likelihood would be an impossible task – but how to make those values manifest, how to bring them up to consciousness for both ourselves and our visitors. We delude ourselves when we think of the museum as a clear transparent medium through which only our objects transmit messages. We transmit messages too – as a medium we are also a message – and it seems to me vital that we understand better just what those messages are. (1989, p. 31)

Although I am not unsympathetic to what Weil writes, it is important to acknowledge that he says this from a position of authority within the hierarchy of the art museum system. His “we” situates the art museum and its political influence clearly in the center of society. “We” transmit messages to whom? – to “them.” The art museum has constantly been subject to demands for reform but ironically those demands have traditionally come from within demonizing academic discourses and not from the realms of popular culture. An angry proletariat has yet to form on the streets to march against the oppression of the art museum! Tony Bennett addresses this subject of reform when he writes:

Although its specific inflections have varied with time and place as have the specific political constituencies which have been caught up in its advocacy, the discourse of reform which motivates these demands has remained identifiably the same over the last century. It is, in the main, characterised by two principles: first the principle of public rights sustaining the demand that museums should be equally open and accessible to all; and second, the principle of representational adequacy sustaining the demand that museums 40

should adequately represent the cultures and values of different sections of the public. (1990, p. 36)

His account of the perceived democratic failings of the museum provides a summary of criticisms the art museum has endured; albeit through largely self-inflicted wounds. Bennett claims this occurs because of a mismatch between the rhetoric of museums as institutions providing public education and the actuality of museums as instruments for the reform of public manners. The former presupposes equal access for all whereas the latter functions to keep the poorly mannered (such as the loud and exuberant behaviors displayed at other popular assemblies) at bay. While I think that Bennett’s position is defensible, the problem is that, in an era when culture is becoming increasingly privatized, globalized and telecommunicated, I am skeptical of an assertion of social segregation based on sensibilities rather than dollars and sense. It seems more convincing to me that the cultural shift has re-configured the art museum as a purchasable and desirable product experienced across many domains. One can still share in the museum’s aura of wealth and prestige but now from the comfort of one’s own home or at the local cinema. One can watch love blossom and lives cathartically change in the museums of popular culture and/or share in the art museum’s success through privately owned reproductions displayed on lounge room walls. Is the question of access and representational adequacy still relevant? Hooper-Greenhill (1990, 1992) continues the argument that the modern art museum has been shaped as an instrument of a disciplinary society intent on transforming “the masses” into an orderly and self-regulating public. She suggests that part of this controlling process comes through an imbalance of 41

power, a result of the art museum controlling knowledge production: “[k]nowledge is now well understood as the commodity that museums offer” (1992 p. 2). Hooper-Greenhill claims the architectural spaces of the art museum set up a division between the producers of knowledge (in the hidden, behind-the-scene spaces of the museum) and the consumers of knowledge (in the public spaces where knowledge is presented for passive consumption and where the public are under constant surveillance).

However, such a discourse smacks of conspiracy theories. Does this mean that my hairdresser is also not to be trusted as she slips out the back to mix up my hair color or dispose of my wet towel? Can restaurants be accused of denying customers their democratic right to know the recipe as chefs secretively construct food from behind closed doors and waitresses constantly watch you eat? I present these examples only half-facetiously, for there remains the underlying assumption that art museums have back spaces, not to hide an array of packing crates, overcrowded office spaces and photocopiers, but to keep some people out of the cycle of knowledge production. It is important that we remember Adam’s assertions that there are many kinds of knowledge and being intelligent depends on where you stand. Arguing that museum knowledge is the most critical in shaping human agency unconsciously reasserts romantic, aesthetico-moral positions of old. I see more value in defining the art museum from a Gramscian perspective where the relationship between the state and the people is characterized as a pedagogic one and one that has the potential for change. As Bennett propounds: 42

A cultural practice does not carry its politics with it, as if written upon its brow for ever and a day; rather, its political functioning depends on the network of social and ideological relations in which it is inscribed as a consequence of the ways in which, at a particular juncture, it is articulated to other practices. (1986a p. xvi)

People are born into an environment saturated with particular conceptual structures peculiar to place and time. They become enculturated by engaging the available symbolic systems to negotiate a way of living there. In simple terms, people are able to act upon and think about themselves and their environment according to the categories of thought and action that are culturally available. But these categories are not rigid structures determining a one-way path for the human subject. They are dialectical and dynamic relations between cultures and human agents. Passive subject becomes active agent, or at least partially so. By acting on and thinking about their living environment people change it and the ways they relate to it and so gradually shift the cultural rules of what is possible and what is not. By engaging the symbolic systems across time they reconstitute the cultural patterns as those patterns reconstitute them as agents. The process of negotiating with all that has gone before comes to include that set of negotiations which adds to, and so changes, the nature of all that has gone before. And so on. This process of “negotiated” living takes time to happen and because it is a recursive, cumulative process the set of possible choices enabled at one point will be different from the set allowed for at another point. Art museums are starting to be known differently in the change from what was a relatively static culture to one that is global, corporate, electronic and constantly reinventing itself. Fifty years ago, the only way to know the art 43

museum was to visit one. Today, that option is still available but there are so many other ways to partake of its mythic seductiveness. The art museum exists as a cultural artifact in the world outside. Douglas Crimp at least acknowledges the “world outside” as significant in his academic writing. Crimp (1993) positions the art museum as the stockade of art’s enclosure. He argues that “the modern epistemology of art is a function of art’s seclusion in the museum, where art was made to appear autonomous, alienated, something apart, referring only to its own internal history and dynamics” (1993, p. 13). He goes on to note that when photography (a marker of a life outside) was finally accepted and displayed in museums, then the museum’s epistemological coherence effectively collapsed. It is meaningless, he suggests, to attribute universal meaning to a work of art when it is constructed and reconstructed in a continuous negotiation with the “world outside” (1993, p. 14). Crimp’s postmodernist perspective constructs the art museum as teetering on the verge of extinction and argues that the walls of the museum should come down for art to be socially and politically relevant. Reminiscent of Andre Malraux’s (1967) “museums without walls” and as pessimistic as Arthur Danto’s (1992) predictions for the demise of Western art as we have come to know it, Crimp’s On the Museum’s Ruins, celebrates the art museum’s descent into rubble. Once again I am struck by the museum’s academic constituents calling for its decimation. In the popular frame, as Rocky Balboa sweated his way to the top steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art in Rocky I, the art museum rose above the landscape as a testament to human struggle and endurance. Crimp may hanker for art to take its rightful 44 place in a “world outside” but he remains trapped within his own academic frame which look something like this:

art museum art in community irrelevant relevant confinement liberation modernism postmodernism

art history “archeology”1 painting photography original mass production canonical non-canonical integrity hybridity authority participant

While he works to remove the art museum from the frame of “aesthetic temple” (which he considers elitist and linked to invalid moral and economic structures), he still engages the original paintings/canonical texts of modernist art history, even if it is only to critique them. He is inextricably bound in the museum’s traditions and forms and not the machinations of the “world outside” at all. When he states, “politics is what art must deny” (1993, p. 256) he assumes an apolitical stance whilst ardently acting out his own politics.

1 The allusion is to Foucault’s notion of archeology which replaced entrenched historical thought that privileged notions of tradition, evolution and development with an “effective history” which was discontinuous, ruptured, displaced, and dispersed. 45

However, it is not language alone that determines how we come to know art museums. Certainly, the language and metaphors we use in respect to museums can shape the way they are perceived. Call a museum a treasure house and people will view its objects as rare and valuable; call it a place of public education and there is an expectation for the enhanced capacity for learning; or call it a mausoleum and the objects will appear irrelevant and out of touch. However, in this dissertation I am looking for something less quantifiable as I search for a reason why art museums meet a need in people’s lives and why it has been so readily appropriated into the texts of popular culture. Meike Bal’s writings in Double Exposures: The Subject of Cultural Analysis (1995) still demonizes museum practice but she also exposes a new frame in the fissures between the object and the word. To articulate the experience she writes that “[w]alking through a museum is like reading a book” (1995, p.4); setting the mind a new challenge to envisage and intellectualize two seemingly contradictory actions and communicative domains. The image and the word, perceived as discreet and different, are momentarily conflated. However, they do not ultimately conflate into one solidified meaning and Bal argues, it is the fissure between the image and the discursive language that surrounds it, that offers the most fertile space for scholarship. Interestingly, she suggests that this space between “thing” and “statement” is filled up predominantly with narrative – narratives that link the “‘present’ of the objects to the ‘past’ of their making, functioning and meaning” (1995, p. 4). These narratives follow “myth models,” that function to inform more and similar myths. 46

Her example is based on representations of the Noble Savage that, she argues, lead to further derivative myths of primitivism and binaristic dualisms such as culture versus nature. The meanings available are mapped in relation to recurrent frames and are situated in relation to the hegemonic positioning of the viewers who are subject to the viewing, social and economic practices of the dominant culture. What if, though, those myth models, inseminated in the bedrock of culture, are not odious but echo our shared humanity; our fears, our lusts and our material desires from the past to the present and beyond? What if art museums are elitist treasure houses but they resonate with our re-incarnated souls? Art museums allow for “building a community among individuals who have not found a meeting ground with others in a physical place” (Marcum 1996, p. 204). In looking at specific theories in new museological criticism it has become increasingly apparent that each attempt works to radically displace assumptions not only on the nature of art museums, but also its reception in the viewer’s eyes. Particularly in the last twenty years, the art museum has been accused of everything from conservative, elite values, to the fetishization of commodities, to the exclusion of marginalized groups. However, it is almost as if society has subconsciously granted the art museum a critical amnesty. Bal calls it an “an unwitting acceptance” (1996, p. 162) but I prefer to think of it in terms of a five dollar bet each way that dreams can come true; that there really is a Santa Claus; that there could be a single answer to life if you just had the time to figure it out; and, amidst all the worries over family, money and illness, a belief that actual lives can aspire to the successes of painted and celluloid lives. Chapter 3 of this dissertation will 47 explore how art museums are represented and interpreted outside of academic discourses – in the daily narratives of popular culture films, a position at odds with the demonizing discourses of Frame 2.

Popular culture.

. . . empowerment and disempowerment in our society do not occur only in grand, isolated moments, but are enacted in the artifacts and experiences of everyday life. Because of the growth in population, technology, pluralism, and knowledge . . . it is increasingly the case that public business is not being managed, and cannot be managed, in occasional single moments of rhetoric (the “great speech,” the “important essay,” the “pivotal book,” and so forth). Because of the growth in these four areas, more of the important business of our society is now done from the moment to moment in people’s experiences of popular culture. (Brummett 1994, p. 62)

In the 1930s, the Frankfurt School reworked Marxism in keeping with the changing perceptions of power, that is, in the ideological hegemony of capitalism as opposed to a class struggle between the workers, standard- bearers of freedom, and a loathsome and despotic bourgeoisie. Its proponents coined the term “culture industry” to describe the industrialization of a commercially-driven, mass-produced culture and they used the same systematic analysis of cultural artifacts as they did for all other products of mass production. The underlying tenet of the classical Frankfurt School project was that the yield of culture industries functioned to ideologically legitimate and reconfirm its own market system and to indoctrinate individuals into the monolithic framework of mass culture. 48

Ardorno and Horkheimer (1972), in particular, derided the supremacy of mass society and their critique of the “culture industry,” shifted the vision of “noble workers” to that of “the masses,” a manipulated and depoliticized bulk of society anesthetized to capitalist values through a monochromatic, popular culture. In “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception” (1977), Adorno and Horkheimer point the finger at film, radio, magazines, fictional prose, popular songs, jazz, classical and orchestral music as examples of the mind-numbing panorama of leisure and daily life since World War II. These leisure activities were perceived as the agents of socialization and the mediators of institutional politics. Adorno and Horkheimer argued that “authentic art” was being compromised at the expense of this crass mass culture and that “the masses” were being passively duped of their critical, cultural inheritance. Although the Frankfurt School offered the first real analysis of popular culture within critical social theory, one of the problems with the work of Adorno and Horkheimer is the dynamics of the relationship they describe between culture and subject. The question that needs to be asked here: Is culture the active agent that acts upon the subject, or does the subject actively participate in the culture? Although Adorno and Horkheimer don’t spell out the mechanics of human-culture interaction, they imply that the inherent nature of the cultural activity/artifact positions the subject as active (for high/bourgeois culture) or passive (for mass culture). They overlook the potential for critical and subversive moments in the artifacts of the culture industry as well as failing to recognize that an engaged audience is often quite 49

capable of producing its own variant meanings from the products they consume. The bad press given to mass popular culture is not new to this century being somewhat reminiscent of Plato’s disdain for art and poets in general (Havelock 1963). One of Plato’s problems with the mimetic nature of art in the cave was that the artwork was twice removed from true reality, Ideal Form: the work itself was a copy of the shadow of the real, a copy of a copy.

Frankfurtian treatments of the popular tap into a similar disdain: the popular is a shallow and superficial copy of high culture. Plato also saw the repetitious recitation of poetry as a left-over from the declining oral culture where it was used as a method for passing on cultural information from one generation to the next. In the new literate culture, such poetic practices precluded the more advanced processes afforded by written records. There seem to be parallels here both in terms of the mass culture models thrown up for the populace to emulate (constructing the self in the image of the Hollywood unreal by buying enabling products, fan magazines, cinema tickets, etc.) and in terms of the perceived undiscerning determinations of the mass culture which inhibit the development of critical thought. Popular culture, centering as it does on pleasure rather than reflection, has likewise consistently been dismissed or given only token attention in the study of art and museums. Popular pleasures, often associated with responsibility-free childhood and adolescence, must be juxtaposed with the learned preference for academic and high culture genres and an accompanying intellectualist disdain of the popular. It is disdain often bred of higher education which has incubated the belief that only the serious matters 50

of the world are worthy of critical reflection and these matters are all capable of rational intellectualization to justify particular judgments. This tradition, most recently supported by right-wing critics such as Bloom (1988) and Hirsch, Jnr. (1988), has fostered an intellectual elitism that has no choice but to despise the so-called culture-destroying artifacts of the popular which always seem about to engulf “civilization as we know it”! Bloom denounces popular culture, and particularly rock and roll music which he describes as “a non-stop commercially prepackaged masturbational fantasy” (1988, p. 75), in his castigation of an electronically-wired, sexually- charged and zombied Generation X. Such discourses of cultural crisis in our youth have historically functioned to legitimize the favored positions of conservative groups, their epochs, styles and successors in the social structures of cultural prestige and power. The pedagogical principles at work here are not dissimilar though to the artworld’s celebration of high culture as a warehouse of precious objects waiting to be taught to each new generation. Museums have been positioned in the modernist paradigm as repositories of individual and national genius. Carol Duncan in her article, “Art Museums and the Ritual of Citizenship,” suggests that the voracious demand for Great Artists to study has been obligingly supplied by legion of art historians and curators trained specifically for the purpose.

It should be obvious that the demand for Great Artists, once the type was developed as a historical category, was enormous – they were, after all, the means by which, on the one hand, the state could demonstrate the highest kind of civic virtue, and on the other hand, citizens could know themselves to be civilized. Not surprisingly, quantities of Great Artists were duly discovered and furnished with properly archetypal biographies by the burgeoning discipline of art history. (1991, p. 97 - 98) 51

The cultural heritage focus of traditional museum pedagogy reinforces an often unstated assumption that elite groupings of people and texts are the only ones that matter; or perhaps in less absolute terms, the ones that matter most. Such an orientation contributes to a faith in the people who constitute these groupings being the most intelligent, the most original, the most tasteful, the most influential, and hence those most deserving to deign what

the world really is (or should be) all about. As Duncan states it, “[t]hose who are in the greatest accord with the museum’s version of what is beautiful and good may partake of this greater identity” (1991, p. 102). The presupposition I have difficulty with here, though, is that Duncan’s position tacitly suggests that those who are in the greatest accord with the museum’s version of what is beautiful are people who are rich and educated. Again, I suggest it depends on where you stand. This frame neglects those “other” groups whose reading and viewing of art museums may be fashioned more by pleasure and curiosity than by a striving for cultural salvation, prestige and empowerment. They, too, can and do identify themselves with the successes of the museum – it just may not be in the same ways. Consumer-oriented texts of mass culture are rich archives – they carry a range of discourses which permeate their reading and viewing communities. These discourses are the resources used in constructing the everyday realities of all people’s lives. Even people who enjoy high art texts such as “serious” novels, classical art and the ballet can also have a taste for basketball games, glossy magazines and situation comedies. Our everyday lives are, to a great degree, installed firmly on the inside of popular culture no matter what we 52

do to pretend otherwise. It is not a concern of whether popular culture is aesthetically correct or not but how we engage with it on a day to day basis. Popular culture is pedagogical and far more compelling than academic culture. The question becomes: How can we, living in a cultural democracy, transform our experiences of popular culture so that on the one hand we can enjoy its forms and on the other, continue to critique its forms? Kevin Moore’s Museums and Popular Culture is one of the first studies to offer a substantial review of popular culture in relation to art museums. He sets out to establish the relevance of exhibiting popular culture particularly in the wake of recent demands for the democratization of public museums (he asserts museums are, after all, funded by public money). Unlike Bloom, he actively promotes the world of “sex, drugs and rock and roll” in his appeal to museums to display the day-to-day objects for which the public feel real passion and display a genuine interest. He also sees value in “museums . . . seek[ing] partnerships to survive” (1997, p. 153) with smaller museums joining other museums in a shared vision of heritage preservation as well as partnerships into the private sector. As Moore suggests optimistically, “If the British Museum will get into bed with Disney . . . “ (1997, p. 154). Moore’s ambition to bring more popular culture into the museum, particularly if curators feature the art objects/products of corporations such as Disney for veneration, is in direct opposition to my vision of the art museum. I see the art museum not as the holder/owner of popular culture but as one artifact in a popular culture whole. This contrariety of vision will be discussed in great depth throughout the dissertation as I question whether 53 the museumatization of the popular is a good thing – a democratization of conventional museum practice that has become inclusive of many lives and interests, or the commercial exploitation of exhibition practice so that we effectively turn museum education into consumer training? As Peggy Phelan so wisely warns, “Gaining visibility for the politically under- represented without scrutinizing the power of who is required to display what to whom is an impoverished political agenda” (1993, p. 26).

It is time to turn around the accepted chain of logic in society that the art museum produces culture and not the other way around. Popular culture is already in art museums as the thirty year residency of Warhol’s cows and Marilyns will attest, and art museums are equally ever-present in popular culture. It is not just the obvious sphere of film that reproduces the art museum template either, for it is repeated in almost all public spaces. The department store windows we pass as we walk down the main street frame models in frontal poses, familiar to the female images we see in art museums. Foyers in cinema complexes, freeze and silence the movie frame with posters reminiscent of painted heroes and heroines from our historical past. Modes of transportation now function as moving billboards, replaying the seductive poses of Eve and Venus or refiguring the perfection of Greek male statuary in advertisements for underpants and bras. The written text of advertisements which once communicated when, where and how much, has disintegrated into a visual proliferation dependent on our acceptance of shared codes of beauty, value and worth. And it is all, not just some of us who share the codes. 54

Investigatory plan.

Chapter One.

In this chapter, I will establish the problematic situation; define the concept of a frame in terms of this dissertation; construct four frames; state the theoretical framework for the study; review and contest research related to the study; turn the focus specifically on art education; and here, outline the structure of the study.

Chapter Two.

In Chapter 2, I embark on the process of making meaning of the four frames first presented in chapter 1. The first frame focuses on the historicization of art and the deification of the painting in both popular and academic discourse. The painting also provides a metaphor for the art museum here. The second frame emanates from the academic discourses of New Museology and views the painting in the broader context of the art museum as institutional structure and ideological apparatus. Although, art and museology scholarship has made these two positions conscious, study of the art museum has thus far finished at the bottom steps of the building. It is the challenge of my research to tamper with those scopic academic constructs, and to stir public recognition of the art museum as it appears in a third frame – the milieu of popular culture. This frame sees the art museum in 55

reproduction and reveals a new perspective on the art museum previously unexplored in academic literature. The final frame draws the lens back to reveal the art museum in and of popular culture, de-centering the art museum, exposing the paradox and providing a new frame for art education that makes visible the fluidity and multiplicity of visual culture.

Chapter Three.

Chapter 3 develops in the realms of Frame 3. I challenge the dominance of the academic frame both in the sources they draw upon and the perspectives and frameworks they use for analyzing those sources. I examine five Hollywood films, chosen at random, to discover what the pedagogies of the art museum are when viewed from outside those traditional boundaries. I look broadly at the relationship between the art museum and film in the twentieth century; offer a summary of the five chosen films; and turn new frames on the films in terms of insider and outsider art museum status, violence, love, gender construction and wishes. I draw many parallels to Judeo-Christian rituals and stories in my analysis of the sacred role of the art museum and explore the many myths that encompass it. I accept that many of the frames I employ are my own personal frames but I am aware of the need to experience new frames and, at times, I do so with the introduction of other viewers. 56

Chapter Four.

In Chapter 4, I reconstruct the four frames constructed in the previous chapters, this time in pedagogical terms for art educators. It is not so much the content of these frames that is important to art educators but the process involved. The frames throughout this dissertation are constructed, deconstructed and reconstructed and this is the pedagogical intent of the

dissertation. This is the lesson to art educators trapped within the gilt-edged frame of the painting. Don’t look for a problem answered in this chapter. You won’t find one. It is deliberately open-ended and polysemic. Frames 1, 2 and 3 in this chapter offer new views on existing art education paradigms and Frame 4 deliberately skirts the big academic conclusion by merely deliberating on the process through stories, mythology and personal musings. This dissertation endeavors to be a model, in itself, of the processes described in the writing. 57

Chapter Two

THE FOUR FRAMES CONTEMPLATED

Jasper Johns, Target, 1974. Encaustic and collage on canvas. Museum of Modern Art, Vienna. VAGA, New York, 1991

Figure 3: Visualizing the Target

Ford tapped Zaphod on the shoulder and pointed at the rear screen. Clear in the distance behind them two silver darts were climbing through the atmosphere towards the ship. A quick change of magnification brought them into close focus – two massively real rockets thundering through the sky. The suddenness of it was shocking. (Adams 1979, p. 97) 58

Introduction to the four frames.

Meaning within a culture is produced because varying contexts are utilized to frame a range of signs, practices and events. An old, disheveled man lying on a park bench, for example, is seen in the context of homelessness and is hurriedly passed by with averted eyes. Take the same old, disheveled man and lie him on a park bench in an art museum and the frame changes our expectations and “reading” of the situation. Now the viewer is allowed to openly stare. The man, although roughly dressed, is more likely to be viewed as being in costume; his recline on the park bench seen as staged; and the whole experience becomes political. How does this experience change again, when we become further removed from the reality of a snoring man on a park bench and view only a painted image of a homeless man exhibited in a gold frame? How does it change yet again when we can purchase a postcard reproduction of the homeless man painting and use it as a bookmark? In this chapter, I explore four frames: two which are bounded by traditional academic discourses that have shaped our perceptions and study of art and art museums; a third which is anchored in the art museum’s reproduction in popular culture; and a fourth frame proposing that art museums are not pre-given and autonomously contained but are formed in continuity with other cultural and social sites/entities. I use the painting (with an italicized the to connote all “museum-quality” images and objects) to frame a discussion on the historicization of art and as a metaphor for the art museum (Frame 1 - The Painting). The painting, I 59

argue, has enjoyed a deified existence both in academic discourse and the discourses of popular culture even though two centuries of formalist interpretation and art criticism have widened the gap between how the painting is known in these two variant contexts. In the second frame (Frame 2 - The Painting in/as Art Museum), I explore how the painting has been viewed in the context of the art museum. Since the 1970s (and the birth of New Museology) critics have decried the art museum as an ideological

apparatus and paradigm of institutional power. In this climate of demonization, the artist has used this frame to re-establish the sense of artist- as-outsider.2 I argue, they have adopted a position of critical innocence, even victimhood, to establish lucrative careers. In the third frame (Frame 3 - Art Museum as Reproduction), I objectify the art museum as a cultural artifact in the realm of popular culture. In the late twentieth century, most people come to frame the painting and the art museum not through formalistic academic discourse but through mediated images and purchasable commodities. Only when we can objectify the institutional character of the art museum from the perspective of popular culture can we see its interconnectedness with other cultural systems and codes. In the fourth frame (Frame 4 - Art Museum in/of Popular Culture) I analyze three images characteristic of Frames 1, 2 and 3 and develop the pedagogical benchmark and heuristic schema for this study. Most significantly, from the fourth frame paradox become visible. The old man on the park bench becomes part of a community of objects, in which he exists

2 I refer here to the nineteenth century artists embodied in the concept of the avant-garde. They too, were perceived as outsiders and this was to become a very useful marketing tool after the breakdown of the patron system. 60

concurrently with his image displayed in an art museum. He exists in both poverty and luxury; as a social outcast and a social icon; as something that people won’t look at and something that scholars assiduously analyze. The man’s life is destined to become part of history and yet he is likely to be buried in an unmarked grave. In the 1990s, André Serano exhibited photographic studies of the homeless which evoked responses of discomfort and guilt and yet, Toulouse-Lautrec’s representations of the prostitutes and shanty dwellers of Parisian society in the 1890s are reproduced in a range of cheerful greeting cards, diaries, scarves and T-Shirts in the museum shop. Time, place and memory play out in this strange, contradictory dialogue between people and objects. We need to acknowledge paradox as a pedagogical strategy; a point I will touch upon in all of these frames and develop further in Chapter 4. The reality of the art museum is in fact many realities. It is known to some by its imposing architecture, its quiet spaces and its air of respectability; to others it is a “strange” place where human by-products are used and an artist hangs from the ceiling on meat hooks; and to others as the place where you can steal a million. The art museum can be a site to meet friends, pick-up wo/men, look hip, drink wine, eat lunch, browse some good books and shop for a gift. At the same time, domestic and everyday spaces afford the potential for contemplation of images, owning and displaying treasured possessions, locking away the valuables and discussing what visual matter one has seen lately. The art museum traditionally was disconnected and discreet from everyday spaces. People went to the art museum. Now the art museum comes to you. There is a translocational relationship between the art museum and popular culture as people buy, construct and interact with their 61 visual culture and create more and more contexts in which the art museum can exist. Mikhail Bakhtin (1981) coined the term, dialogism, to explain how contexts function as cultural frames; how narratives and discourse always carry traces of other contexts and how these traces will inevitably restrain the way we find meaning in a text. All texts resonate (or are in dialogue) with other texts, contexts or places in which the text has been. As readers/viewers of texts and as makers of texts, we shape frames to sustain our belief of ‘what is going on’ in any process of making meaning. What we say or make is dependent on what others have already said or made and our expectations of the responses we’ll receive. It is Bakhtin’s notion of dialogism which theoretically underpins my thesis of reciprocity between art museums and popular culture: that popular culture exists in art museums as art museums exist in popular culture. The art museum may be a cultural vacuum, but equally it is an artifact in the sweep of popular culture. Traditional academic discourses intellectualize the boundaries that mark off the art museum from its society (Frames 1 and 2) and therefore fail to acknowledge or celebrate this new reciprocity. Jacques Derrida in Living On: Border Lines, identifies some of the positive possibilities of moving through and beyond the frames that we build. He writes of artificial dividing lines between fantasy and “reality,” an event and a non-event and the superimposing of one text on another. The cover, the cut edges of the pages, the page numbers etc. may seem to delimit our knowledge of what a book is, and yet, it is when we draw upon already established and shared sets of meanings from other books and representations of books, 62 repeated beyond the frame, that we really come to comprehend “book” in its broadest terms. As Derrida writes of the restrictive borders imposed on texts which co-exist in a web of other references or in “a context,” he poses questions as to the ramifications for the institution of reading (and I shall add, the institution of exhibiting) when the borders are no longer so strictly maintained or easy to determine. Although Derrida bases his ideas on deconstructing literary texts, his notion of borders has relevance to a study that searches to comprehend, not “book,” but “art museum” in its broadest terms. The edges of the built structure and intellectual art discourses delimit our knowledge of what an art museum is.

If we are to approach a text, it must have an edge. The question of the text, as it has been elaborated and transformed in the last dozen or so years, has not merely “touched” “shore,” le bord (scandalously tampering, changing, as in Mallarmé’s declaration “On a touché au vers”), all those boundaries that form the running border of what used to be called a text, of what we once thought this word could identify, i.e., the supposed end and beginning of a work, the title, the margins, the signatures, the referential realm outside the frame, and so forth. What has happened, if it has happened, is a sort of overrun (débordement) that spoils all these boundaries and divisions and forces us to extend the accredited concept, the dominant notion of a “text,” of what I still call a “text,” for strategic reasons, in part - a “text” that is henceforth no longer a finished corpus of writing, some content enclosed in a book or its margins, but a differential network, a fabric of traces referring endlessly to something other than itself, to other differential traces. (1979, p. 256 -7)

Derrida, in his concerns for an “overrun,” a “differential network,” offers a new perception on the “spoiling” of the borders, of an intertextual fabric of “traces,” interconnected into other realms of life. Such an overrun, is integral to my argument of viewing the art museum from multiple paradigms with 63

equal curiosity; as overlapping and interconnected with other cultural sites, where meaning is open to negotiations, paradoxes exposed, questions seen as worthy aesthetic acts and “uncertainty is a key part of pleasure” (Rugoff 1995, p. 79). In an educational context, Giroux talks in similar terms to Derrida’s “spoiling” borders, when he writes of “rupturing” borders in the drive to “interrupt representational practices that make a claim to objectivity, universality and consensus” (1992, p. 31). He argues that pedagogical borders need to be “challenged, crossed, and refigured,” that we need to reposture the way knowledge is produced and to provide students with opportunities to read “against, within, and outside [the] established boundaries” (p. 30) of texts. Giroux calls for educators to incorporate in their pedagogy, the theoretical understanding of how meaning is produced in a mesh of economic imperatives and desire for pleasure; to look at texts not as isolated entities but as chunks of life that function as part of a much wider ranging intertextual dialogue in which many different voices can take part. The art museum in and of popular culture, provides a place where the paradox becomes evident and ethical, moral and authorial deliberations can be framed and reframed. Finally, throughout this chapter I use the painting, Target, by Jasper Johns as a motif to introduce the four frames. Each time, I set the terms on which you view the target. The target is perceived in a literal sense, as a point of attack, as a commodity and as concentric circles. It is my expectation that the real and familiar object of a target will help make the abstract and shifting perspectives expressed by each frame more concrete and easier to 64

comprehend. The fact that this target is also a painting with a title is also an important feature of the discussions.

Frame 1. The Painting.

Museum in Popular Culture

profane sacred

erotic sensual bodies as objects romantic love

Museum Demonized Museum Deified

elitist elitist exclusive inclusive because of FRAME 1 its aspirational and inspirational role The Painting authoritarian authoritative an agent of oppression a moral voice

Museum in Academic Discourse

Figure 4: Highlighting Frame 1

On a physical level, you only have to open any art book to find an example of this first frame - the painting. Cropped to the edges of the canvas, the painting seldom shows any traces of timber frame or the wires that hold it in place. In fact anything that might impinge upon the picture itself has been 65 carefully removed. The painting is an enigma, one that fails to offer any clues as to where it is located or where it has been. We have been trained to look only at what is inside the frame: everything outside the frame is irrelevant. Unpack the concertina-ed pages of the book and extend them around a wall and you have an art museum. Row upon row of framed images on white walls, removed and disconnected from their previous contexts. Once again, the imperative is to look only inside the carefully maintained borders.

Alberti suggested that the painting in its frame was like “a window on the world” (Jay 1988, p. 9). John Berger rescripted this in the context of a modern society obsessed by commodities when he proposed that the painting was “a safe let into a wall, a safe in which the visible has been deposited” (1972, p. 109). However, it is a painting by Jasper Johns (1974) that provides what I believe to be the more telling metaphor for art and art museums as presented in academic discourse. In the painting, Target, your eyes are uncontrollably drawn to the center and as Philip Fisher adds, “[e]verything beyond the outer edge is a miss and counts as zero . . .” (1991, p. 79). The painting demands our attention. Take aim. Look at me. Pierre Bourdieu (1984) in Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, suggests the concept of a pure and targeted gaze can be distinguished as an historical maneuver linked to the emergence of artistic autonomy during the Post-Impressionist era of the nineteenth century, where an organized collaboration of artists and dealers began to impose their own norms on both the production and consumption of its products. The artist shifted from master of an apprentice system to master of an economic system and what emerged was a product which highlighted the style of 66 representation over the subject of representation. No longer was who or what was painted important but the indeterminate domain created by a deliberately open and polysemic text gave rise to the formalistic artspeak of form, manner and style. Art no longer imitated Nature: art began to imitate and respond to other art. By linking art into a self-referential frame of its own history, it demanded to be perceived only in historical terms. An intellectual discourse of historical allusions created a cultural code around artmaking that only an elite group could access. Fisher explains it in this way, “[a]s our approach to art has become more and more intellectualized, the terms of criticism have interiorized themselves to become the terms of art itself” (1991, p. 23). This atmosphere of philosophical deliberation is delivered by highly trained academics, artists and critics whose essential task is to highlight and maintain the deification of art/art museums to a world outside but at the same time interiorize its concerns within a boundary that only the trained can access. Fisher draws a parallel with the craftsmen of old who physically fashioned frames when he writes of this intellectualization: “[t]he painter now shares his labor with the critic who has stepped in to fill the shoes left empty by the makers of ornate frames and pedestals” (1991, p. 91). In short, academic discourse replaces timber, dowel and gold leaf in the making and defining of the painting’s borders. The spread of the painting with its own style and period and self-serving criticism developed in tandem with the emergence of the public art museum and its rationalist principles of classification (Hooper-Greenhill, 1992). Fueled by a growing capitalist enterprise, industrialization and a collective belief in 67

the probity of science, the painting was also characterized by an increasing secularity and dedication to the glory of man. Mystical and religious leitmotif were re-articulated into a more personalized, profane discourse. Material things were made more meaningful. The painting also became a signifier of genius, talent and taste within a strictly defined art discourse. These terms were already in use prior to the nineteenth century but they took on very specific meanings in the context of modern art and the modern art museum:

to make art, one had to have genius; to be a genius, one must have talent; and to assess art, one must have taste. And taste usually equated with social and economic privilege. However, as the diagonal axis dividing Frame 1 in the heuristic model suggests, this is only half of the story for the painting straddles both academic discourses and popular discourses. Certainly, within academic discourse, knowledge of the style, form and period of the painting excluded a section of the community, not privy to the nuances and subtleties of the discourse, from partaking in that discourse. This was not to say, though, that those uneducated in the ways of the established art discourse did not find ways to talk about and know paintings. The painting gained credibility largely because, for many, it seemed to reproduce reality in an apparently magical way, that is, that there appeared to be no difference between the image and the “real” (Bryson, 1983). In fact, to be regarded as successful, the painting had to make us forget its materialness, its touchability, its weight, its wires, so to speak. It had to transport the brush-stroked persons and events of its flat 68

surface into the narratives, myths and assumptions of the “reality” in the consciousness of the viewer.3 The effective seamlessness of this juncture between painting and viewer’s reality script is often spoken of in romantic terms – in academic discourse as a universal, aesthetic experience and in everyday discourses, through quasi- religious terms which frame a belief in “the image as the resurrection of Life” (Bryson 1983, p. 3). Gee, it was phenomenal - the painting was so real. The

magic is experienced in conjunction with technical wizardry – paint as skin, paint as diamond, paint as water. It is these unique relationships that people have with the painting (and the art museum) that makes it such a fascinating artifact. No matter what the terminology, the painting has enjoyed a deified experience. The person in the street and the art historian both revere the painting albeit in markedly different ways. Moreover, one of the paradoxes of the painting is that it may appear to be iconic but in the lives of most people, it is in fact, symbolic. It always stands for something but inevitably, it stands for something other than itself, that is, a paint-daubed canvas fabric, stretched tautly around a mechanical frame, then reframed in a decorative frame. It is difficult to quantify what that something other than itself actually is because it is dependent on the individual viewer’s reading of the text, but rarely do we read a painting in its sheer flatness. In the twentieth century, abstract artists eschewed pictures of “real” people or objects in an attempt to create a universal language to which people of all cultures could relate. These ideal images reduced the world to

3 There seems an historical progression here to the television which equally depends on a suspension of interest in the objectness of the television itself, demanding instead, entry into the narratives of the image. 69

pure lines, shapes and colors in an attempt to represent the metaphysical realm. In 1915, Kasimir Malevich even went so far as to exhibit a black square at the 0-10 exhibition in Petrograd, hung diagonally in a corner of the room. Far from achieving a metaphysical state, the abstraction served to make visible the materials, the flatness and “the wires” of the painting. Painting became its own subject. As Mary Anne Staniszewski describes it, “[r]ather than being a universal language of the modern world, abstract Art was – and remains today – an arcane, esoteric subject that is understood and appreciated by an informed few” (1995, p. 193). The sacred had become profane and the general public’s disenchantment with this kind of art was palpable. The gap between academic and popular discourses on art became estranged. The traditions of Cartesian perspectivalism which underpin Western “realism” in art insist that we enter the hierarchical model of distinguishing objects in space. Martin Jay in his article, Scopic Regimes of Modernity, believes that scholars have analyzed every aspect of perspective and yet agree in loose consensus on only this point: “Growing out of the late medieval fascination with the metaphysical implications of light – light as divine lux rather than perceived lumen – linear perspective came to symbolize a harmony between the mathematical regularities in optics and God’s will” (1988, p. 5 - 6). The space created by the illusion of perspective was linked to spiritual and moral concerns. Indeed, besides the spidery written words of old letters and diaries, there is no other Earthly form of visiting the past; of meeting our ancestors face to face; of confronting the consequences of their choices; or of sharing their human angst. We are drawn in through a perspectival looking glass which has been mythically imbued: she was so real 70 you just wanted to reach out and touch her. If we did read the painting as flat, we would perceive of it as a series of objects exhibited and placed next to one another on a plane surface. Ironically, it would in fact, be analogous to the art museum itself. In the Age of Reason, the painting has no operative use or function. Where is the rationality of wearing white gloves to touch it, in using hushed tones before it, in affording better housing to it than to most people? There is no comparable object in the material world that is financially valued so outrageously out of proportion to the value of its constitutive parts and base costs. Yet, the painting remains a cultural enigma. It has been attacked as an ideological tool of elite classes, but the painting equally remains deified as a magical and spiritual time machine to our past. The painting exists to make a memory of our human origin; writing and rewriting our ancestral name. The painting lets us believe that we can cheat death. It is a chance to be immortal; to defy the inevitable victory of Nature over Humankind. 71

Frame 2. The Painting in/as Art Museum

Museum in Popular Culture

profane sacred

erotic sensual bodies as objects romantic love

Museum Demonized Museum Deified

elitist elitist exclusive inclusive because of FRAME 2 its aspirational and The Painting in/as inspirational role authoritarian Art Museum authoritative an agent of oppression a moral voice

Museum in Academic Discourse

Figure 5: Highlighting Frame 2

In poststructuralist theory, it is argued that meaning is never fully present in a sign (Eagleton 1996). We only come to know the sign through the process of differentiation – comprehending what it is, by eliminating what it is not. By “framing” the signifier in a context with other signifiers, we assign meaning. For example, when you go to the National Gallery, you walk up a grand staircase and into an imposing foyer. You see the title “Masterpieces of American Art” and when you move closer to view a painting of a homeless man, a guard asks you to step back and not to touch. The reading of the 72

painting is a site of ideology framed by the signifiers of the building, the title, the guard, the use of the word “masterpiece” and so on. If the image of the homeless man was viewed in another “frame,” say a police mug shot, then its meaning and social relevance would be decidedly altered. Thus the reading of the painting is contingent on the art museum context. Likewise, the reading of the art museum is contingent on how the museum is framed in the discourses that surround it.

In the heuristic model, Frame 2 - The Painting in/as Art Museum is situated in the demonized, academic discourse of New Museology. In the 1970s, 80s and 90s as the frame pulled back to reveal the traditions of painting within a museum system, the painting and the art museum came under enormous deconstructionist attack. Jasper John’s Target once again provides a useful metaphor only this time it becomes: Take Aim and Fire! Museological research, particularly that inspired by Foucault’s theories of knowledge production, effective histories and the panoptic gaze, has positioned the art museum as authoritarian and elitist and an institution inculcating dominant ideologies and power. Bennett, Hooper-Greenhill, Crimp and associates have vilified the art museum as an institution of oppression, irrelevance, social apartheid and cultural homogeny. This paragraph by Hooper-Greenhill is indicative of the modish intellectual disdain for the art museum:

Relations within the institution are skewed to privilege, and enable the hidden, productive ‘work’ of the museum, the production of knowledge through the compilation of catalogues, inventories, and installations. The seriated public spaces, surveyed and controlled, where knowledge is offered for passive consumption, are emblematic 73

of the museum as one of the apparatuses that created ‘docile bodies’ through disciplinary technologies. (1992, p. 190)

So too, are these criticisms expressed by Bennett:

The museum . . . explicitly targetted (sic.) the popular body as an object of reform, doing so through a variety of routines and technologies requiring a shift in the norms of bodily comportment. This was accomplished . . . by the direct proscription of those forms of behaviour (sic) associated with places of popular assembly by, for example, rules forbidding eating and drinking, outlawing the touching of exhibits and, quite frequently, stating . . . what should be worn and what should not. In this way, while formally free and open, the museum effected its own pattern of informal discriminations and exclusions. (1990, p. 46)

These examples summarize a fundamental weakness in New Museology, in that it offers a convincing critique of the art museum but offers little more than social guilt to a rationalization of the museum in society. Where I think both of these writers fall short in their analysis, is in their perception of “the public” as a docile and manipulated group who are being controlled by a hegemonic, museum overlord. The public are characterized as mere inchoate jelly waiting to be molded and with no personal agency what-so-ever; in short, a cause and effect relationship. In reality, “the public” are far more pro- active and capable of agency than the academic research suggests. As I reiterate throughout this dissertation, “the public” liked what they saw in the art museum, so much so, that they decided to create versions of museums in their own spaces: popular culture. Hooper-Greenhill, Bennett and associates working in the discipline, can conceive of the art museum only in one- 74 directional terms: of people wanting to get in the art museum and of their “exclusion” and “marginalization” if they don’t come in. Moreover, the art museum has become so problematized in academic discourse that it is almost impossible to exhibit anything that is not seen to be tainted by class or personal interests. As Susan Pearce writes,

The hierarchy of intellectual and aesthetic values that make up the tradition of western high culture is being challenged by a kind of ‘cultural relativism’ in which all things are seen as equal and no firm footing of value or understanding can be established. (1993, p. 25)

Calls for the democratization of museum practice are certainly valuable in essence but even if it was possible to create a completely equitable museum space, would we want one? A flattened hierarchy and non-authoritarian model of pedagogy as expressed in New Museology is unrealizable. Surely there is more at stake here than exhibiting textual polysemy. The greater imperative is for the art museum to provide moral and ethical benchmarks that help sustain critiques of injustice and exploitation. The art museum jeopardizes its authority and claims to knowledge altogether in its pretense of offering an ideal viewing situation. Recent attempts to define a new pedagogical mission for the art museum have, in many ways, emulated the same ethical concerns of glorified mission statements of the past. ‘Equal access and education for all’ has been rewritten now in terms of social justice: the museum helping the public to deconstruct and resist dominance. Throughout its history, the public art museum has always endeavored to provide cultural benchmarks of moral, political and ethical worth, although it is a chicken and egg scenario as to whether the 75

museum or the culture at large has shaped those criteria. Can an insensate object such as a museum shape anything? Certainly, it can contextualize or frame how people see things. If we are to demonize the art museum at all, then it must be for its continued belief in its own importance; its cultural centrality. There are many forms of authority across multiple locations and institutional spectrums and the art museum is but one site. As I suggested earlier, an inflated pre-occupation with the museum’s pre-eminence has given it an inflated “power” in terms of both the perceived good it can do and the evil it can inflict. This demonization of the art museum is also paradoxical on another level. The harsh criticism voiced by academics and critics has been supported from within the ranks of artists as well. It seems that those who criticize the art museum the loudest are the same people who have a vested interest in the continuation of the art museum in its present form. Since the 1970s, artists of color, women, gay and lesbian artists, and ironically many white male artists, have undertaken a range of critical practices to highlight and reprimand the white, heterosexual, male-dominated museum system. Certainly, their claims and disputes are valid and have brought attention to the inherent biases and imperialism in museum culture. However, the question arises: why don’t these artists aim to bypass or close art museums? Why has so much energy gone into being accepted by a system that, as these artists expose, is largely reprehensible and bigoted. Hal Foster argues that “[t]he artist innocent today is a dilettante who, bound to modernist irony, flaunts alienation as if it were freedom” (1985, p.20). Rather pointedly he also suggests, “the past is entertained precisely as publicity” (1985, p. 20). He 76

implies that through means such as critique, artists are linking their art to well-known images/objects and museums from the past to gain public attention. Arthur Danto discusses the paradoxical character of the Guerrilla Girls, a collective of spirited women who have engaged in a form of guerrilla warfare against major art museums and galleries.

The group has been exceedingly radical in its means and in its spirit. It is genuinely collaborative, to the point that the anonymity of its members is a fiercely held secret: appearing in gorilla masks is a metaphor for that. And the art of this superordinate entity is certainly a form of direct action: its members plaster the walls of Soho with brilliant, biting posters. But the message of the posters is that not enough women are represented in museums, in major shows, in important galleries. So it envisages artistic success in the traditional, let us say, using their concept, white male terms. Its means are radical and deconstructive, but its goals are conservative. (1997, p. 147)

Again I want to emphasize that the women who constitute the Guerrilla Girls’ movement have good cause to be angry at centuries of systematic discrimination but, as Danto points out, their goal is ultimately a conservative one – to join the establishment. Their posters and billboards proclaim, “These are the most bigoted Galleries in New York” and yet they remain the most internationally sought after galleries for exhibitions. Recent artistic discourses exhibit a kind of self-flagellation, a badge of disenfranchised victimhood, a poor-me rhetoric that sells, making money and attracting lucrative publishing deals. Foster comments, “Shock, scandal, estrangement: these are no longer tactics against conventional thought – they are conventional thought” (1985, p. 26). Alternative spaces are commonplace, 77

site-specific works no longer seem out of context, and works by marginalized artists appear regularly in mainstream galleries. Again I turn to Foster to highlight the ephemeral nature of marginality. He writes:

Certainly, marginality is not now given as critical, for in effect the center has invaded the periphery and vice versa. Here a strange double-bind occurs. For example, a once marginal institution proposes a show of a marginal group: the museum does so to (re)gain at least the aura of marginality, and the marginal group agrees . . . only to lose its marginality. (1985, p. 26)

Moreover, we have also witnessed many artists remonstrating the fallibilities of art museums from within the art museum itself. Critiquing, from safely inside or at the very least with a foot on the threshold of the institution, the anti-genius is in its own way, a new form of hip, upscale cultism. Joseph Beuys, in the 1970s took aim at the art museum or, more precisely, the production of exhibitions within the art museum, and for a while, unsettled the previously clear cut divisions between the painting and painting, artist and curator, studio and gallery, industry and fine art, outside the museum and inside the museum. Beuys was one of the first artists to curate an exhibition as his “work of art,” gathering together mundane manufactured and industrial objects and installing them in glass cases. In short he was removing objects from the realm of the everyday and putting them on display out of context. By doing so, he critiqued the symbolic nature of objects on display and the political practice of putting them on display. He also disrupted the conventional expectation of the painting as work of art and pointed to its less pure side, as a commodity. 78

However, Beuys also straddled another boundary – that between artist and actor. By doing so, he effectively made a connection between art and movie and artist and movie star. Andy Warhol is the most obvious twentieth century artist to have made this transition visible but Warhol was also very open about his adoration of the image and fame. Beuys engaged with fame too, though achieved by means of a demonizing political discourse aimed at deconstructing art and the art museum. In Coyote: I Like America and America Likes Me performed in 1974, Beuys’ arrival in the United States was marked by an ambulance meeting his plane, its lights flashing, and being carried on a stretcher to a downtown art gallery. Not quite a divan chair carried by slaves, but Beuys, none-the-less, was carried ceremonially through the streets of Manhattan. For three days, the artist was enclosed behind a chainmail fence with a coyote, a mound of hay, fifty copies of the Wall Street Journal, two felt blankets and a water dish. His protest against the persecution and destruction of indigenous animals and peoples was photographed and filmed and is now memorialized on video and in coffee table art books. He was right: America did like him. Warhol wore silver wigs (almost a tiara?) whereas Beuys’ gray felt cloak became a kind of “antigenius” marker. He contested the institution only to become an “institution” himself; one of the leading heroes of the system he denounced. Hans Haacke was aware of the links between art and power but perhaps not the irony in his attempts to critique the art museum and its corporate benefactors from within the system. He stripped away the shiny, smooth veneer of the art world when he made visible, what by all traditional practices, should have remained concealed. He focused on the corporate 79

sponsorship which silently fuels the museum system. In MetroMobiltan, his first New York show in 1983, he mimicked the Metropolitan Museum of Art facade and its blockbuster banner for “Treasures of Ancient Nigeria.” Haacke’s banner heralded the arrival of the exhibition that was funded by multi-national oil company, Mobil. At the time, Mobil was one of the largest investors in a racially-divided and autocratic South Africa. On the banner, Haacke reprints actual responses made by Mobil management to shareholders who raised questions about their exploitative involvement in South Africa. Comments such as “[t]otal denial of supplies to the police and military forces of a host country is hardly consistent with an image of responsible citizenship in that country,” make visible the hypocrisy of celebrating African culture whilst the sponsor profits from a corrupt apartheid regime. The artist effectively revealed the ludicrousness in seeing the painting as autonomous. Haacke focused on the institutional frame and its economic logic but simultaneously held his “exhibition” in that frame – on the screen of a major art museum with all its corporate sponsors. His subversive act became an act of personal exposition. Beuys and Haacke, along with artists such as Marcel Broodthaers, Barbara Kruger, Martha Rosler, Sherrie Levine, Jenny Holzer and Krysztof Wodcizko have treated public space and social representation in the art museum as a target. Certainly their work has provided provocative social interventions but through the attention drawn to the institutional frame, their transformative aims have merely functioned to reinforce that institutional frame and ensure their own personal fame. Their gestures against the museum have perversely confirmed the bourgeois cliché of the 80

artist and sustained the imprimatur of the art museum. The art museum has survived, and perhaps even benefited, from this process of demonization. As Foster says, “. . . the conventions of art are not in decline but in extraordinary expansion” (1985, p. 19). Exposed for all its unjust and discriminatory practices, the art museum still remains a revered cultural site by people outside of the museum industry. Similarly, even within the museum industry, the art museum is regarded as foremost in the prescribed aesthetic system of galleries, alternative spaces, art collectors, art magazines, art historical texts, art products and the auction houses4. The artists who actively took on the museum system are now its acknowledged celebrities, featured in books, magazines and on CD Roms and T-Shirts sold through museum shops. Staniszewski writes:

Most individuals [today] do not read about Art to discover how an artist resolved the composition of a particular painting; rather, they read articles to learn about skyrocketing or crashing auction prices, to find out who is running our museums, and to know why a collector is buying a particular kind of photography. Articles and essays today deal with topics like galleries gentrifying neighborhoods. Magazine picture stories feature an artist’s newly designed loft. (1995, p. 260)

The painting, the art museum and the artist are linked into social columns, financial sections of the newspaper, house and garden magazines, eligible bachelor surveys and tabloid gossip.

4 In parallel to my writing this dissertation, the President of the United States is enduring a very public investigation of his private life, his integrity is in question, in what the press has dubbed, Zippergate. President Clinton is accused of having an affair with a White House intern, Monica Lewinski, and of having asked her to lie about it. Mr. Clinton, it is also claimed, has sexually harassed other women and had shady real estate dealings in the past. Amidst all this intense scrutiny and media frenzy, the President’s approval rating has soared. The museum, like President Clinton, is also soaring in popularity even though it has been shown to be totally dishonorable. 81

The political and pedagogical issues posed by all by this though, are complex and contradictory. As I outlined before, Bakhtin’s notion of dialogism is the theory that all forms of communication are structured as dialogue; that all texts function as a response to texts that have gone before and in anticipation of a response from texts that will be created in the future. If this is true, then we all contribute and are thus complicitous in the hegemonic practices/discourses of art museums. It is not a matter of “us” and

“them.” Artists, critics and academics who attack the hegemonic practices of the museum are a part of those very same practices. They may define themselves as deconstructionist critics of the institution but ultimately they are the new breed of institutional “experts.” They re-inforce the traditional frames of art and museums. In Frames 3 and 4, we begin to see the art museum through new frames. In these frames, the academic voice is marginalized, or at least, decentered. 82

Frame 3. Art Museum as Reproduction.

Museum in Popular Culture

profane FRAME 3 sacred Art Museum as Reproduction erotic sensual bodies as objects romantic love

Museum Demonized Museum Deified

elitist elitist exclusive inclusive because of its aspirational and inspirational role

authoritarian authoritative an agent of oppression a moral voice

Museum in Academic Discourse

Figure 6: Highlighting Frame 3

Refocus the frame. The painting and the art museum become part of the milieu of daily life and move away from the rules and conformity of academic discourse and into the more eclectic realms of popular culture. The art museum at the turn of the new millennium exists in a world of mediated images and information propelled invisibly on electromagnetic pulses; where memory and illusion coalesce to shape the present moment; and we use the notion of a global village as a metaphor for defeating spatial and temporal constraints. Fashion, graphic design, raves, sci-fi scenarios, globally televised 83 war, weather satellite pictures, virtual reality, online shopping, electronic commodity markets, cybersex and post-everythingness combine to effect an atmospheric, ghost-like shimmer over the subtle displacement of life by image. The art museum correspondingly transforms into paper, plastic, video tape, film and digital light and even more importantly, can be price- tagged and put on sale. Jasper John’s Target is now mass-produced and on sale at Walmart or online in the a-aw-a-aw of a modem. Take aim. I got it.

It’s mine! Foster provides the perfect springboard for the deliberations of Frame 3 when he discusses the work of artists, Louise Lawler and Allan McCollum. He suggests that their work “stresses the economic manipulation of the art object – its circulation and consumption as a commodity sign” (1985, p. 104). Indeed, Lawler and McCollum’s exploration of art collectors and their hunger for pictures, pedigrees, expenditure and accumulation, makes evident the link between purchasing art and purchasing taste and prestige. Lawler, in Arrangement of Pictures reframed images to show how museums, corporations, “old money” families and the nouveau riche varyingly mark and display the painting. McCollum produced a range of decoy paintings, beautifully framed and mounted blank images of varying sizes and proportions, to meet the growing demand for buying “name” art, regardless of what it looks like. Foster suggests that Lawler and McCollum,

. . . seek to reveal the definitional character of the supplements of art, only they tend to foreground the institutionally insignificant (the overlooked) rather than the transparent (the unseen) – functions like the arrangement of pictures in galleries, museums, offices, homes, and forms like press releases and invitations which, thought to be 84

trivial to the matter of art, in fact do much to position it, determine its place, reception and meaning. (1985, p. 104)

However, I don’t think that Foster, Lawler and McCollum go far enough in their definition of the “institutionally insignificant,” of things “thought to be trivial to the matter of art.” They stop, like hitting a wall, at the edges of the painting. Anything that does not relate directly to the painting or the museum system becomes irrelevant such as representations of paintings/art museums in films or as advertising or mentioned by a talk show host. I contend that these “trivial” sites do much, if not more, to position the art museum: to determine its place, reception and meaning in the realms of most people’s lives. Moreover, yes, purchasing art is akin to purchasing taste and prestige but it can be about other human desires and practices as well. The importance of these forms of symbolic and imaginary art museums should not be underestimated for they carry with them trace elements of the real art museum and its mythology. For example, there is a scene in the television teen drama Party of Five where Julia Salinger takes her boyfriend, Griffin, to an art museum. They go into the museum, obviously after closing time, and she has set up a kind of alter with burning candles before Gustav Klimt’s painting, The Kiss. The painting is magically lit from below not from the traditional sources of rack lighting above. In front of the painting, Julia says that she wants to tell Griffin how she feels. She declares:

I tried to write it but I couldn’t.

Here. (She leads Griffin over to Klimt’s painting.) 85

This is how I feel.

They’re like one person . . . sort of flowing into each other . . . just like nothing can touch them . . . nothing can pull them apart.

This is how I feel.

(Party of Five, 1999)

Julia and Griffin kiss as the camera pulls back to frame the couple in the painting. We know that teenagers can’t use art museums after dark for private love trysts, let alone have naked flames in a gallery but in this version of the art museum, high school drop-outs make their love sacred. This art museum is not about prestige or taste or accumulation: it becomes a conduit through which cultural meanings of romantic love are transmitted. Academics such as Kevin Moore in Museums and Popular Culture bemoan that there is no youthful energy, excitement and danger in art museums. He writes:

‘Sex and Drugs and Rock’n’roll’, the title of the classic punk anthem by Ian Dury and the Blockheads, is a parody of what popular culture is, but it emphasizes the aspects of everyday life that museums have ignored most, and in doing so have excluded a sense of youthful energy, excitement and danger. (1997, p. 73)

Art museums may appear sedate to Moore but the inherent aphrodisic, exotic, violent and omnipotent qualities of museums have not gone unnoticed by a number of movie makers. They have used the museum to frame a range of human practices from murder, theft, infidelity, abduction, entrapment and extortion in films with titles such as Blackmail (1929), Gaslight (1944), One 86

Mysterious Night (1944), Voodoo Tiger (1952), Vertigo (1958), A Bucket of Blood (1959), The Happy Thieves (1962), How to Steal a Million (1966), The Hideaways (1973), Rocky I & V (1976, 1990), Tourist Trap (1979), Dressed to Kill (1980), Batman (1989), She-Devil (1989), Demolition Man (1993) and Absolute Power (1997) but to name a few. We, the audiences, are not shocked by these events taking place in an art museum. Subconsciously, we are aware of the primal impulses of sex, greed, anger, revenge and ascendancy that art museums culturally symbolize synchronous to its educative, inclusive and noble ideals. The power of representation and the ease with which the self can now fuse into images onscreen, means that for the price of admission to a cinema, or the purchase of a television set, we can partake of the mystique of the art museum. Likewise we can buy a postcard of the painting in a department store for forty cents. The art museum may be about prestige for some, and crime for others but it is always sacred; owning a piece of it is like having a stone from the dismantled Berlin Wall or a vial of water from Lourdes. The stone, the water, the postcard may exact no change in our lives but we keep them stored safely none-the-less. The pedagogy of the art museum is more about how to survive life than it is about specific styles of painting. Chapter 3 of this dissertation will explore in much greater detail the range of desires, hopes and fears framed by the art museum in popular culture. Finally, I want to highlight the paradox inherent in this frame; to observe how art museums have framed themselves in light of the recent academic attacks (as outlined in Frame 2) and the changing technologies of popular culture. Few could argue that museums have made a major effort to 87

re-write themselves as more user-friendly and democratic spaces. Politically- correct sensitivity towards those of different gender, race and sexual orientation is being addressed; “touch and feel” exhibitions and interactive computers offer greater engagement with the displays; revisionist reconstructions and installations invite new and varied perspectives; musicians and performers provide movement and noise to the quiet halls; and coffee shops, restaurants and sales outlets make visits to the museum a

social outing. However, given such momentous efforts to be inclusive and open to all groups within the culture, has the demographic of visitors to the art museum greatly changed? It is difficult to offer a definitive answer here, but ostensibly, the answer must be, no. The broader public does not need to visit art museums because they have created their own. Rather than calling for its demise, “marginalized” (an elusive academic category established to separate “us” from “them” once again) people, for the first time in history, have access to the art museum through the technologies and texts of popular culture. They have simply appropriated what they want from the art museum and incorporated it into their own lives. This process is neither random, nor haphazard. Paintings and museums represented in popular texts do meet very particular criteria - just not necessarily the same criteria as those which apply to the artistic culture as seen in museums and their satellite institutions. The art museum is now known in many manifestations and art aficionados and academics have no power in these new domains. The art museum, through no practice of its own, may finally be truly democratic and belonging to everyone. 88

Frame 4. Art Museum in/of Popular Culture.

Museum in Popular Culture

profane sacred

FRAME 3

erotic sensual bodies as objects romantic love

Museum Demonized Museum Deified

elitist elitist exclusive inclusive because of its aspirational and FRAME 2 FRAME 1 inspirational role

authoritarian authoritative an agent of oppression a moral voice

Museum in Academic Discourse

FRAME 4 - Art Museum in/of Popular Culture

Figure 7: Highlighting Frame 4

In Frame 4 - Art Museum in/of Popular Culture, we must undertake a major perceptual shift. We must change what we know and how we know it. We have learned to look at the target as a structure that draws our attention to a center. That center is the most important and highly rewarded locality on the target. Around the center are a number of hierarchical circles decreasing in value in relation to the growing distance from the center. When we move past the outer edge of the target, the space becomes worthless. The target is 89

indicative of the way we have come to look at the painting and the art museum. However, when we look at Jasper Johns’ painting Target it is only the title which forces us to view a series of circles in these terms. The title (like intellectual discourse) frames the way we know and view the painting. There is another way to know these circles; as a series of concentric rings in and of one another. Each band is a part of the whole and all parts of the matrix can exist independently but function more cohesively when viewed together. To date, the art museum has enjoyed a privileged cultural position, made central by the intellectual discourses that frame it. Frame 4 offers a new pedagogical perspective that accommodates multiple paradigms. I want to begin my deliberations on Frame 4 by examining three images. The first belongs to Frame 1. It is a painting that has been mythologized in art history; its creator branded a genius; and its audience, both academic and non- academic, genuinely reveres it. The second image evolved within a demonizing, academic discourse as represented by Frame 2. Its main purpose is to critique a patriarchal art and museum system but it has made the artist an expert within that very system. The third example came to my attention via my letterbox and Poulsen Painting, “a partner in quality with Dulux” paints (Frame 3). I want to share with you my shift in cognition when I discovered, albeit momentarily, that I was no longer in the frame. The first image, idiosyncratic of Frame 1, is Michelangelo’s Creation o f Adam (1508 - 1512), part of a fresco on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican, Rome. 90

Michelangelo Creation of Adam 1508-1512.

Figure 8: First Image – Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam

The Creation of Adam is one of nine scenes from Genesis presenting the Creation of the World to the Drunkenness of Noah. Two passages transcribed from H. W. Janson’s History of Art provide a characteristic description of Michelangelo’s genius and the making of the painting.

The concept of genius as divine inspiration, a superhuman power granted to a few rare individuals and acting through them, is nowhere exemplified more fully than in the life and work of Michelangelo . . . Not only his admirers viewed him in this light; he himself, steeped in the tradition of Neo-Platonism, accepted the idea of his genius as a living reality . . . Conventions, standards, and traditions might be observed by lesser spirits; he could acknowledge no authority higher than the dictates of his genius. (1986, p. 451)

. . . the Creation of Adam must have stirred Michelangelo’s imagination most deeply; it shows not the physical molding of Adam’s body but the passage of the divine spark - the soul - and thus achieves a dramatic juxtaposition of Man and God unrivaled by any 91

other artist . . . This relationship becomes even more meaningful when we realize that Adam strains not only toward his creator but toward Eve, whom he sees, yet unborn, in the shelter of the Lord’s left arm. (1986, p. 454)

Janson’s words, steeped in the discourse of genius, talent and taste, exemplifies the historical discourse that deified the painting to a state of divinity.

I digress for a moment to recount part of the story of Adam and Eve as told in Genesis. Eve is tempted by a tree laden with delicious-looking apples. She picks an apple, eats some and offers the rest to Adam. At this moment their eyes open to the nakedness of each other; in short, nakedness has been created in the eyes of the beholder. However, the blinding paradox in the story is that although they have both eaten from the apple and both are naked, Eve bears the blame and is punished by being made subservient to Adam who, for his sins, becomes the agent of God. In 1982, Barbara Kruger produced an untitled work, emblematic of Frame 2, featuring the extended hands of God and Adam appropriated from Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam. The image has been blown up and then cropped severely, and overlaid with the text, “You invest in the divinity of the masterpiece.” Kruger is clearly conscious of the inherent paradox in the story of Adam and Eve and the social, psychological and economic investments in viewing man/painting/art museum in divine terms. Her use of the pronoun “you” presupposes that the “you” who stands accused, is male. 92

Barbara Kruger Untitled 1982.

Figure 9: Second Image – Kruger’s Untitled

Feminist theory has contributed much to current understandings of masculinist representations of the female as “other.” The female body has been systematically objectified and eroticized for the visual pleasures of upper-class, white, heterosexual men. To purchase a painting of a female nude is akin to possessing a woman and having access to her nakedness at whim. Kruger’s juxtaposition of the “masterpiece” with the sharply pointed text unsettles the comfort zone of the viewer and provides a new frame through which to view the original painting, not to mention the original sin. 93

The third version of Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam arrived yesterday in my letterbox. A postcard of the image was superimposed with the words, “Our professionals make every ceiling a work of art . . .”. On the reverse side it states: “I would like to introduce myself. I am a professional painter working in your neighborhood. It would be my pleasure to help you with any decorating projects you might be planning. Please call me now.”

Poulsen Advertisement 1999.

Figure 10: Third Image – Poulsen’s Advertising

Life is often synchronous. All week I had been teaching my university classes about icons in our culture and Michelangelo and his painted ceiling in the Sistine Chapel had been nominated by my students as likely candidates for our “Art Hall of Fame.” In particular, they mentioned the moment when God’s finger reached to touch Adam’s in the Creation of Adam. I had thought 94 of introducing Barbara Kruger’s appropriation in the following week’s classes to offer a new frame on an old icon. My mental notes started to frame Kruger as very astute and as a nonconformist taking on the art establishment and hundreds of years of gender injustice. My teaching plans though, were disrupted by my surprise reaction to the postcard. I had seen Michelangelo’s image used many times on cards, scarves and T-Shirts in museum shops. This Poulsen version seemed to offer a mildly amusing pun on painting, ceilings and painters and yet my eyebrows involuntarily raised when I first saw it, as did the eyebrows of some friends in the art industry, when I showed it to them. The voice in my head was speaking to me directly from the learnt responses of Frames 1 and 2. In particular, I was associating myself with Barbara Kruger, an indomitable, intelligent woman of the late twentieth century! However, the Poulsen painters presented me with a whole new discourse. Poulsen may or may not be aware of the paradox of Adam and Eve or the construct of genius surrounding Michelangelo and his painted ceiling in the Sistine Chapel, but he associated himself with a fellow painter with a good reputation: Michelangelo. What takes place in popular discourse represents a different construction of reality and shared meaning – one, in this case, where I had became totally irrelevant in my art academic role and I felt completely left out of the frame. I was momentarily impotent, robbed of my special icon and my agency in Frame 3, until as citizen, I realized that I, too, had a lounge room needing to be painted! There have always been people who have felt offended or misrepresented by what is displayed in art museums. Aboriginal people have for centuries 95

been angered by the display of their private ceremonial paintings and relics in museums. Women, under-represented as artists, have equally been outraged by the disproportionate representation of women as the object of nude studies. Likewise, in everyday spaces people accomplished in art academic discourses have been, and continue to be, offended by the appropriation of their imagery by others. Even bad painting has been categorized as “Bad Painting” so that the art expert remains in control of the painting. I was

prepared for Michelangelo to be a genius, his work a masterpiece, and for Kruger to deconstruct such patriarchal notions as ludicrous and injust. However, in one reflexive moment I was unprepared to accept Mr. Poulsen’s right to connect his name or profession with my Michelangelo. A truly democratic state is not some bland, homogenous moment where everyone is satisfied. When there is tolerance for many voices it doesn’t mean it is without contention. The fourth frame offers the potential for all of these frames (Frames 1, 2 and 3) to co-exist but sees none of them as mutually exclusive. There is no need for these positions to be integrated or reconciled or seen as more important than any other. While the art museum’s institutional conceptions of audience threatens to lose sight of the finer detail of variegated audiences in everyday situations; conceptions of the art museum situated purely in the texts of popular culture threaten the loss of the sacred artifacts of our past and its shadows. Yes, art museums are ideological apparatuses but at the same time it is also possible “to appreciate their peculiar, and often delirious, poetics” (Rugoff 1995, p. xi). The painting and the art museum exist in many forms and this will be contentious and paradoxical but it also provides many ways of knowing our world; of 96

recognizing that diversity can give rise to creativity as well as conflict. A society retains its vitality when ideas are contested by vigorous debate, argument and negotiation based on mutual respect. Freedom of speech and the rights of people to believe in “gods” of whatever form, are part of a healthy, pluralistic society. So too, is a certain irreverence towards the reverent and a willingness to rally against injustice. A truly democratic pedagogy is one that offers ethical and moral authority but encourages altercation and the potential for new frames on that authority. I argue that the art museum has remained largely unchanged for centuries – it is just the people around it who change and adapt it to meet the variant needs in their own personal lives. The art museum is brick, motionless, silent, insensate: it has no doctrine. However, some people learn about the past from it; some see it as a place of discrimination and power; some see it as a big shop and cafe; some see it as a sacred shrine of love; and yet others see it as a place to rob. Academic discourses have tried to tell us that the art museum has only one pedagogy – an elitist, patriarchal one – but I’m saying there are many, many teachings here. The art museum presents human moral benchmarks but its pedagogy – what and how it actually teaches us – is as divergent as the number of people who know art museums. 97

Chapter Three

LOOKING THROUGH FRAME 3: THE PEDAGOGY OF ART MUSEUMS IN POPULAR CONTEMPORARY FILM

“The Babel fish,” said The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy quietly, “is small, yellow and leechlike, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe. It feeds on brainwave energy received not from its o w n carrier but from those around it. It absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to nourish itself with. It then excretes into the mind of its carrier a telepathic matrix formed by combining the conscious thought frequencies with nerve signals picked up from the speech centres of the brain which has supplied them. The practical upshot of all this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language. The speech patterns you actually hear decode the brainwave matrix which has been fed into your mind by your Babel fish.” (Adams 1979, pp. 49-50)

The rationale for viewing art museums on film.

The rationale for this chapter is to dispute the primacy of academic discourses in defining the pedagogy of the art museum. I challenge this academic dominance, both in the sources it draws upon and the frameworks and perspectives it uses, in analyzing and making sense of those sources. The biblical Tower of Babel provides a useful analogy here, as it did for Douglas Adams creating his Babel fish. In academic discourse, the art museum is seen 98

in central terms as the tower. However, building the tower, being seen from the tower, and looking upon the tower, aren’t the only ways to view the art museum. The language of academic discourse is so embedded in its own world that it doesn’t always match what is happening outside the tower. What has been constructed in academic discourse as the confused (babelled) language of the masses is now being translated in this chapter. Translating the babel is trying to make sense of the world of the other. In the language of babel, the pedagogy may be quite different both in its relative importance and its content. Indeed, I argue there is much to learn from the perspective of the babel and in Chapter 3, I “stick a Babel fish in [my] ear” (Adams 1979, p. 50) and use sources found beyond the tower; drawn from the bedrock of popular culture with no claims to a universal language. To achieve my task, I will look at the art museum from the perspective of contemporary film and its viewers. This seems an appropriate frame because of the colossal disjunction generally perceived between the high art museum and mass film culture. However, in 1936, Walter Benjamin in The Work o f Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction suggested that “mechanical reproduction of art changes the reaction of the masses toward art,” and that “[t]he reactionary attitude toward a Picasso painting changes into the progressive reaction toward a Chaplin movie” (1969, p. 234). Such claims effectively prophesized the ultimate slippage of the art museum into the realm of popular culture and vice versa. Although most popular films are not specifically about art, artists or art museums, Arnold B. Glimcher, owner of the Pace Gallery in New York says of films, “[a]ll directors are influenced by art, whether it’s Peter Greenaway looking at Dutch paintings or Gorillas in t h e 99

Mist looking at Rousseau . . . Artists create the visual vocabulary of the century, and everyone draws from it” (Muchnic 1992, p. 131-2). Equally though, it could be argued that the contemporary artist has borrowed heavily from the practices of the filmmaker. From Fluxus artist, Nam June Paik’s first video exhibition in 1965 to the contemporary works of Max Almy, Gilbert and George, Martha Rosler, Bruce Nauman and Tony Oursler but to name a few, the moving image has become commonplace within the art museum.

In this chapter, I look only in one direction; at representations of the art museum in the texts of popular culture, and specifically, through the moving pictures of film, television and video. For the purposes of this study, I have randomly chosen five films to explore what the pedagogy of the art museum is when viewed from within the frame of Hollywood movies. The five films She-Devil (1989), Batman (1989), L.A. Story (1991), Born Yesterday (1993) and Absolute Power (1997), have little in common except for their close adherence to traditional Hollywood narrative structures and their portrayal of a uniquely American culture. Although these films were released through cinemas, I have come to know them all through television and video sources. Three of the movies were recently shown on Australian television in the one week, and all have been screened within the last three months. Let me make it clear that the movies I am analyzing here are not about art, art museums and/or artists, nor could any of the films be regarded as art house films. Two of the films center on female protagonists who are learning how to make their way in elite society and the other three films focus on male characters who are engaged in a range of physical and emotional 100

contests in pursuit of justice, power and the affections of the heroine. I was initially attracted to the films only as easy-viewing fiction but was intrigued by the recurrent use of the art museum as a setting for these seemingly unrelated narratives. Repeatedly, I found myself asking why the scene had not be shot in a bar or a restaurant for example, particularly as in most of the films the artwork remained purely incidental. What purpose does the museum-as-setting play in character and plot development; what human practices and beliefs does it tacitly endorse; and what ideological readings do the viewers bring to the texts? Moreover, another caveat should be added here. In the analysis of the five films I need to stress that there are infinite frames through which you can view them. Popular culture doesn’t represent some homogenized, one-size- fits-all view of the art museum because society isn’t constituted by one-size- fits-all people. Popular culture is not bound by the hard and fast rules of academic discourse and in its diversity, it offers lots of possibilities. I do not want to be a ventriloquist talking the views of young men or teenage girls or lesbians or Muslim women for that matter. I see myself more in the role of a cultural broker or an archeologist in writing this analysis, re-negotiating and piecing together viewpoints based on a lot of assumptions. I do offer some alternative views such as those that might occur in the viewing frame of adolescent boys, and relate the comments of two young girls with whom I watched one of the movies, but I go there merely as a broker not as an authority. 101

Art museums and contemporary film.

It is fair to say that representations of art and art museums are becoming more and more conspicuous in contemporary film. Art house film-makers such as Greenaway have consistently embellished their films with sumptuous art images and references but increasingly, less highbrow movies are borrowing the art museum as a setting and using real works of art to authenticate their illusory worlds. Deals are done over drinks between artists, gallery directors and Hollywood producers5 and public officials for cities are scrambling to offer a wide range of facilities to film-makers, including public art museums, in an effort to stimulate local economies. As Suzanne Muchnic suggests in her article, Lights, Camera, Artwork!, “[i]n major studio productions art turns up as a backdrop for comedy, an object of crime, the ultimate commodity, an emblem of exclusivity, and an artist’s passport to fame, fortune, and lavish cocktail parties” (1992, p. 129). The sign system of the art museum now crosses and merges with an escalating number of other sign systems. Through its increased exposure in the media, art museums have become very familiar artifacts in all our lives and not just those of a select elite. The space between layperson and connoisseur is becoming increasingly ambiguous. Even if there is no art museum in your small town, you still know how to behave in one because you have seen Meryl Streep, Roseanne, Clint Eastwood, Sylvester Stallone, Melanie Griffith, Don Johnson, Steve Martin, Kim Bassinger and Jack

5 Oliver Stone’s mother, as an “old friend” of the gallery procured a Picasso and a Renoir from Wally Findlay Galleries in New York for use in Wall Street. Steve Martin is a Trustee of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the place where several scenes for L.A. Story were filmed. 102

Nicholson do it all before you. The pedagogy of the art museum has undergone a major fundamental shift here as we learn its ideology not through art texts and paintings but through dialogue and actions delivered by major Hollywood stars. The teachings of the art museum become visually blurred with movie stars, fast cars and exotic locations and produce a discursive conglomeration of Hollywood hype, romance and suspense encrusted around a residual core of institutionalized aesthetic rituals.

Hollywood hyper-ritual intersects with the layered sediments of traditional art museum ritual. Moreover, despite all the calls for the art museum to change (as characterized in Frame 2), its etiquette, language and practices seem to remain largely unchanged in filmic domains. For example, a highly technical art discourse is regularly deployed in these representations regardless of the audience’s potential literacy in such a discourse. The peculiarities of formalist artspeak continue unabated largely because viewers accept that “talking” in art museums is different, like “talking” in churches is different, to the way we speak in everyday conversation. In the Church we have the notion of the liturgy; a formulaic way of speaking or praying in church services. The liturgical hours delineate the ceremonies and set prayers that are performed at certain hours of the day. The art museum likewise, follows established ceremonial rules of what is to be said, when and by whom. It is the ritualistic practice and not the pretentious talk of form, style and period, to which people respond. In the concerns of Frame 2, the nexus of the art museum and commercial film (culture meets economics and technology) offers an important critical 103

space for investigation as bourgeois concerns are seen to be increasingly reinforced in mass media texts. In these critiques the art museum appears in film only to inscribe class-based styles and tastes upon the people and products in which it comes in contact. If we turn the lens though, there is the proposition that the opposite is true. Popular culture has taken the art museum hostage and it is now a servant, not to the bourgeoisie but to the consumer. Ideological assumptions which equate the art museum with high art and Hollywood with all that is trashy and crass still persevere. However, Hollywood powerbrokers, in their unique ability to morph, re-script and re- invent the filmic industries for financial gain, have learnt to incorporate the art museum to their advantage and, I must add, visa versa. Films certainly cash in on artists and art museum settings but on the other side of the camera, the real-life artists and art museums which appear in films enjoy mass exposure and consequent increases in their own market profitably. Diane Waldman poses the question: “So how does popular film view modern art?” and responds to her own question by suggesting, “ . . . with hostility and suspicion” (1982, p. 54). Whilst Waldman is referring specifically to modern art and not the institution of the art museum per se, I still feel she has misjudged the responses of both movie-makers and audiences alike, to art and art museums in film. In cinema space, everybody owns the Elgin marbles or the Old Masters or a Picasso. We are not hostile towards characters who own, make, steal or view art in movies because in those dream spaces, in the privacy of our own heads, we see ourselves in equal terms. We are hostile towards characters who are destructive towards art and the art museum such as the Joker in Batman. His desecration of the 104

art museum is experienced as a personal assault on our property. He is marked as evil and the audience joins forces with the good characters to rally against him. However, when the lights come up, the boundaries between films and art museums are more conspicuous. They are viewed through new frames and different discourses come into play around them. No longer are we at one with the art museum, art objects and characters on screen but our difference

from them becomes more visible. We now walk past the Guggenheim Museum of Art on our way home from the cinema. Let us consider for a moment the discursive boundaries in which mass film culture and the “real” art museum exist to help us to identify the relationship between the two. Many art and film academics like to see the two as separate and distinct but it is more reasonable to acknowledge their development throughout the twentieth century in connection to one another. Meaning is created in terms of how the one relates to the other, or as Bakhtin suggests, in a dialogue between them. They both have been considered representative of the larger context of culture from which they derive but in the “natural” hierarchy of western culture the art museum has invariably been valued more highly than the cinema. Film has often been seen as a corrupting form (if we watch violent films then we will become violent or if children watch sexual acts then they will become promiscuous) whereas art has been perceived in more noble terms (if we view a violent battle then we learn about courage and bravery and if children view a nude, then they learn about the beauty of the human body). Table 1 maps out these 105 tentative boundaries as a set of parallel binary oppositions that summarize some of the assumed characteristics of both domains (Murphy, 1995).

Table 1: Mass Film Culture versus Art Museum Culture

Mass Film Culture Art Museum Culture

Access

Mass produced and all pervasive. Exclusive and rare. Immersion/participation by default. Must be actively sought out. No real effort is required to access it. Effort is required to access it.

Discourse

Coded in common languages. Coded in specialist languages. Restricted to the everyday. Elaborated beyond everyday. Easy to ‘read’ - no formal education Difficult to ‘read’ - formal required education required.

Cultural experience and human response

Mortal. Immortal. Pleasure and easy amusement. Pain & ecstasy, austere delight. Entertainment. Enlightenment. Diversion. Reflection.

Commerce

Commercial motives. Pure motives. False or created needs. Humanistic needs. Artifact as commodity with Artifact as aesthetic object with exchange value. inherent value. Value determined by market. Value determined by civic, institutional principles. 106

In Frame 3, when the art museum and film are conflated into the one space these clear-cut, academic definitions become very blurry though. The frames marking all of these boundaries are disintegrating as art museums need exposure and promotion to survive in economically rationalized times and films attempt to dignify and legitimate the “American way of life.” In an era marked by homelessness, unemployment, epidemics of chronic fatigue syndrome and AIDS, rising crime rates and drug addiction, food and water chemical contamination, social security cutbacks, American military intervention and lying, cheating Presidents, film-making relies more and more on the core legends traditionally analogous with the art museum to sanctify its version of the American Dream. Likewise, the artist and art museum employ marketing strategists and promotions specialists to reach the kinds of audiences and billion dollar incomes that successful films can achieve. This interchange blurs traditional perceptions but doesn’t actually change either of the domains and is symptomatic of the implosion of oppositional urban subcultures that so characterizes postmodern times. Likewise, we can develop a set of binary positions that stereotype the fictional characters within film narratives either in terms of being an “insider” or “outsider” in the museum setting. Again, I am not offering these binaries as rigid categories but I am suggesting that they form some of the tacit guidelines that Hollywood film-makers compliantly follow and reinforce in their movies. If a character is perceived as an “insider,” then we can largely assume that they have won social approval and acceptance and if they are “outsiders,” then they are perceived as graceless, praetorian and/or evil. 107

Table 2: Stereotypical Characteristics of Art Museum Insiders and Outsiders

Outsider/art museum Insider/art museum

Personal attributes ugliness/homeliness. beauty. poverty. wealth. suburban. urban. dumbness. intelligence. material. spiritual. cheap tastes. expensive tastes. ordinary. extraordinary.

The body naked. nude. sexual. sensual. promiscuous. virtuous. clumsy. graceful. violent/aggressive. peaceful/calm.

Emotional conditions starvation. nourishment. boredom. exhilaration. exclusion. acceptance.

The analysis of the five films will explore these binaries: examining why film directors link their characters to the art museum; how permanently fixed characters are to the stereotypes; and what cultural advantage we each perceive (depending on our frame) in being an “insider” or “outsider” character. 108

The film analysis will also look at the pedagogical lessons we learn about love and violence in the art museum. Both in its history and its representations, the art museum has intensified those human instincts and yet paradoxically promoted a selective blindness towards them. It is an historical given that the bloody transition of power that marked the French Revolution was synchronous with the opening of the first public art museum. Our human capacity for cruelty, lust and savagery became effectively veiled within an heroic discourse. The first public art museum revealed the noble spirit and ideals of humankind and not its butchery and debauchery. In the art museum we glimpse the darker side of humanity but through refocused and relatively dispassionate eyes. The art museum expresses life’s intangibles – the things we feel but may not always want to articulate – and becomes the intermediary between human barbarism and human civility. Barbarism becomes civilized through the institution of the museum. Barbaric depictions are reframed in an iconic refinement of the human spirit. Muchnic, in her research on making films in art museums, suggests that “[s]cenes involving explicit sex, violence, or denigration of art are generally not allowed” (1992, p. 130), and yet this seems at odds with several of the events that took place in the movies I viewed. The art museum setting was always portrayed as dignified, imposing and contemplative but it also was the venue for sexual encounter, vandalism, murder and criminality. When Harris K. Telemacher in L.A. Story admits he gets “emotionally erect” viewing Helen Frankenthaler’s painting Renaissance, and Mary Fisher purrs to the married Bob Patchett that “a stimulated accountant” sounded 109

interesting to her; the line between a passionate art discourse and a sexual, my-bed-or-yours conversation, seems very fine. Jack Nicholson’s Joker character in Batman lead his men on a large-scale killing spree and a vandalistic rampage, and Telemacher’s humorous prank of roller skating through the art museum in L.A. Story seems anything but respectful. Thief, Luther Whitney treated the museum with quiet respect but for the purposes of familiarizing himself with the next mansion he planned to rob. The museum’s paradoxical gloss of civility selectively blinds us to the barbarism of some human acts. Part of this paradox is also the fact that not only is the art museum used as a location for crime and illicit sexual liaison but it is also regarded as an anathema to crime and the place where we find true love. Billie Dawn’s outburst in Born Yesterday is indicative of this irony. She staunchly proclaims, “Maybe I am dumb but I know there’s a better life than this. I want to be like those Van Gogh people - where people care about each other.” Billie announces this after her first visit to an art museum and on being shown a painting by the Dutch artist of a happy family in a vegetable garden. She stands toe to toe with her ruthless, criminal boyfriend, Harry, and suggests he improve his life by “tak[ing] a watercolor class.” “I’m rich for a little bit,” she says after realizing all of Harry’s business assets have been put in her name, “I’ll buy you a beach [for Harry to take long walks along] and I’ll pay for your watercolor class and I’ll get you a ticket to the museum so you can see that Van Gogh painting.” The art museum, we are to believe, has the transformative power to change a corrupt multi-millionaire into a fair and honest businessman. Moreover, Billie discovers true love under the track 110

lighting of the National Gallery. This transformation posits the art museum, like the Church, as a place we go to for religious substantiation, redemption and a “cure.” The analysis will also look at how the actions of men and women are played out within filmworld art museums. What are the different outcomes of their association with the museum? What are the similarities? Many of the art museum scenes involve romantic liaisons between men and women

and violent confrontations. How do the sexes respond to these variant situations? Who are the winners and who are the losers? The Frame 2 inspired She-Devil provides an interesting contrast to the other films, developed as it is, from a feminist perspective. Feminist scholarship has repeatedly argued that the camera lens continues the socially situated epistemological standpoint of masculinity. Indeed, stereotypes of women as housewives and bimbos occur in these films and women are the victims of extreme violence. However, in the realms of Frame 3 and these five films, housewives and bimbos have agency in their lives as men have only a fifty percent chance at best, of getting what they want out of life. The pedagogy is in many ways skewed to favor women in these circumstances. Finally, in the analysis of the films I explore the pedagogical yoke between art museums and society’s wishes and dreams. Several of the characters discuss their dreams in conjunction with the art museum scenes. Those dreams are very diverse and at odds with academic, pedagogical perceptions of art museums as profane, elitist and authoritarian. Art museums fulfill a sacred role and offer the religious potential for miracles. 111

I recently asked my university students to bring a precious possession with them to share with the class. Although there was jewelry brought along, the preciousness was not marked by the price that was paid but by who gave the jewelry to them. Most often, it was handed down through several generations of the family. In those terms, the jewelry was priceless. One student brought the plastic hospital bracelet of his first born child. He said the two inch plastic strip was so important to him that he locked it in a safe.

Students cried showing us torn and battered photos, burnt plastic spoons and yellowed newspaper clippings. The common thread between all of these stored and carefully tended objects was their perceived connection to other people. And those people were not the same people, nor were they necessarily rich people or powerful people. They were people whom they loved, had been loved by, wanted to be loved by or dreamed of loving. The objects were also markers of battles won. A male student bought in a snooker white ball. It was the ball he had used to beat a prominent politician in a game. Art museums are about sacred human connections and directors borrow them for their films. 112

Summary of the films.

She-Devil (1989, Orion Pictures).

Scene featuring an art museum.

Husband and wife attend a party held in the Guggenheim Museum of Art. Wife is out of place in the museum - wrong clothes, wrong conversations, wrong actions. Husband meets, flirts and eventually leaves his wife for a woman who does fit in the museum setting.

Details of scene.

Based on the Fay Weldon feminist novel, Life and Loves of a She-Devil, the 1989 movie, She-Devil, casts television sitcom star, Roseanne Barr Arnold Thomas, alongside two-time Academy Award winner, Meryl Streep. Roseanne’s popular show characterized what Douglas Kellner calls “loser television” (1995, p. 149) and he positioned the working class actress’ winning formula alongside The Simpsons and Beavis and Butthead. Streep, on the other hand, is a highly decorated, award-ceremony queen with an impressive film biography. Right from the beginning, the dye in this film is cast and we know, even before we see the cinema poster or the plastic video box, who of our highly paid actresses will be the “insider” and who will be the “outsider” 113

looking in. Considerable fuss was made in publicity and critical material over Streep’s move away from her dramatic roles and into comedy but the overweight, TV Roseanne, although highly proven in comedy, was never a contender in the Movie Star versus Television Star contest. True to form, it is Streep’s Mary Fisher whose first screen appearance takes place in the art museum setting. We first meet Roseanne’s Ruth Patchett in a mall. She is shopping for her

Cinderella garb to wear to an important party. She roves the Department Stores for make-up and clothing and sits patiently under the hairdryer for her perm to set. Husband, Bob Patchett (Ed. Begley, Jnr.), has found an opportunity to access a better class of client at an unspecified (although highly-regarded) function and Ruth is determined to be a worthy asset to her husband. Bob’s not so sure as he tries to dissuade Ruth from coming but she struggles into dresses that are several sizes too small for her and endures the withering stares of shop assistants in the course of social betterment. As she confirms to Bob on the phone that she is looking forward to the evening, classical music insinuates itself into the scene. Ruth checks her reflection, playing with her fizzy hair in the sheen of the pay phone, and an elevator in the background heads “upwards.” The experience of being in the art museum for Ruth is humiliating although she doesn’t seem to notice. The mother of two, described on the cover of the video box as a “fat, frumpy, suburban housewife with a mustache and a facial mole that looks like a surgically implanted sultana” wanders carelessly into the realm of beauty. From the first frame we accept that she is not welcome. In a fairly calculating move, the location director has chosen 114

the ultimate space that will demean her character. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum provides the quintessential location for accentuating her otherness. Ruth totters around in her tight new high heels, isolated in her lumpy, floral dress and plastic beads in a sea of sleekness, plain colors and pearls and equally sleek splashes of color in the paintings of Arnulf Rainer which feature on the walls. She wears her pink handbag slung across her body as if anticipating a grab-and-run attack in the mall. No-one speaks to

Ruth, and she makes her way to where all lonely people at parties who are not engaged in conversation head – to the table of food. The Mary Fisher character works in juxtaposition to the lonely Ruth. She is surrounded by admirers and is described in Ruth’s voice-over as “rich, pretty and thin.” Fisher is a romance novelist and when Ruth accidentally upends her drink on Mary’s pink silk gown, she is excited to be meeting someone she greatly admires. An embarrassed Bob stops to help clean up the spill sending Ruth off to the bar for salt and Perrier. At the bar, Ruth commits her next cultural faux pas as she ecstatically tells the man beside her that “I just dropped my wine on Mary Fisher . . . you know, the famous author.” Ruth fails to understand the literary hierarchy that proclaims romance fiction to be a lesser art. Unperturbed, Ruth wanders off between the waiters holding silver platters of exotic fruits, clutching her salt and Perrier, and a tea towel in her hand like the glum housewife she seems destined to remain. At first, Mary, the maker of lesser art, seems to fit in the museum setting but there is a growing mistrust of her credentials when she plays her hand at Bob. Bob is an accountant who introduces himself pretentiously as a 115

“financial consultant,” one who is “moving heavily into artistic management” because he likes “being around creative types.” In the fancy dress of his hired tuxedo and moving gracefully to the classical strains of “Strangers in the Night,” such talk doesn’t seem out of place but his mundane name, Bob, regularly punctuates the discussions with a clanging reminder of his working class status. Frank Sinatra’s melody of love at first sight escorts them around the spiraling floors of the Guggenheim, where talk is about money, not paintings and sexual friction ignites the exchange. As the movie progresses we eventually come to agree that Mary is not “good art,” but for now she appears to have all of the characteristics we associate with an “inside the museum” character. Eventually she is revealed as a forgery and the working class accountant can’t pick the fake. The art museum scene finishes with a cut to Mary, in the front seat of the Patchett sedan, talking about the romantic joys of family life in the suburbs (about which she can speak romantically for she has never actually experienced it firsthand). Like the art expert, she offers her opinions with aplomb all the time safely capsuled in the Patchett automobile. The car pulls into Parkside Manor, a depressing treeless, suburbia, and home to Bob and Ruth. In their metaphorical journey they have traveled from the Guggenheim Museum (home of individual expression), on the side of Central Park to Parkside Manor, the drab and emotionally-desolate location solemnizing street after street of identical houses and not a tree in sight. The winners and losers of life are clearly revealed. Just as the elevator went up in the moments before the museum scene, so seesawed the social platform as Ruth is off-loaded unceremoniously onto the pavement alone. 116

Batman (1989, Warner Bros.).

Scene featuring an art museum.

A maniacal criminal contrives to meet a beautiful, young photographer in an art museum. He murders all the other patrons before going on a vandalistic spree upending and throwing paint on the artworks. He tries to persuade the woman to join him in the avant garde of a new aesthetics - homicidal art. The woman is rescued from his clutches by a dashing caped crusader.

Details of scene.

Batman is based on characters appearing in DC comics and later, a television adaptation. The original creator of Batman, Bob Kane, developed his Dark Knight around a nocturnal and mysterious animal and although Batman’s masked and rubberized figure appears fugitive, we learn he is on the side of good not evil. Batman (Michael Keaton) spends his daylight hours as billionaire, Bruce Wayne, living in a castle-like mansion with his butler and as an accepted part of the moneyed establishment. It is not quite clear what Wayne does for a living but we do see him hosting a charity gala and accept his social munificence. By night he assumes his bat alter-ego and fights the forces of evil in the mythical Gotham City. Those of us more familiar with the almost burlesque television series of the 1970s are shocked by the 117 congenital nihilism in this movie version. Here is a society on the brink of decay. Danny Elfman provides the ominous and sinister soundtrack for this dark, somber and violent movie. The opening scenes of the film feature a very Gothic looking Gotham City. Designed by Anton Furst, the city is a highly stylized, art deco version of 1930s New York with a futuristic feel reminiscent of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. The featured art museum is similarly constructed; part steel space ship, part gracious old brick building. The museum is called the Flugelheim Museum which is surely a pun on the Guggenheim Museum. The name is embossed into the cold, gray metal above the door, and the doors themselves are studded like a pit bull terrier’s collar. Inside, though, the art museum is more familiar as the strange futuristic features that look like airplane engines on the entry walls are replaced by elegant circular windows and a broad, winding staircase. There is an array of well-known paintings displayed on clean, white walls. Most peculiar though, is the fact that it seems to be night time outside the art museum and day time inside. When Vicky Vale (Kim Bassinger) arrives at the art museum it is dark outside and we see many people moving about on the streets amidst traffic chaos. The scene is cold as people move with a hurried sense of purpose to wherever it is they are going. However, inside the museum daylight streams in through the windows and a skylight above. Then, when Batman and Vale burst out of the museum, some five minutes of carnage later, it is night time again. The museum street lights are on, car lights are on, and the streets are dark and largely deserted. The art museum seems constructed as some warm and sunny oasis in this grim cityscape. 118

The scene featuring the art museum is heralded by the Joker (Jack Nicholson) announcing, “Daddy’s gonna make some art, darling.” The Flugelheim Museum is gently lit, soothed by classical music and full of people viewing art and dining in the restaurant. Ms. Vale waits in the restaurant to show Bruce Wayne her photographic portfolio. She is surprised by the delivery of a small box with a large bow and a message written in crayon saying “URGENT.” When she opens the box, there is a gas mask and a second note in crayon, “Put this on right now.” Immediately, poisonous purple gas floods out of the air-conditioning ducts killing all the people (except Vale) in the art museum. Corpses are strewn across the floors like some macabre battleground scene or schoolyard massacre. The director has tried in part to make this event humorous (some of the diners fall head first into their lunches etc.) but for me, this is a highly unnerving and violent scenario. The Joker enters the art museum with a group of his henchmen. He announces, “Gentlemen, let’s broaden our minds.” One of the henchmen is carrying a boom box and it is activated to send forth loud, funky music. The Joker and his men dance around the gallery spaces knocking sculptures from their plinths and defacing some of the Western world’s best known paintings including a Degas painting of ballet dancers, a Rembrandt self portrait, a Renoir and Gainsborough’s Blue Boy. Two portraits of former United States Presidents, George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, are shown. The Joker mentions that Lincoln needs a shave and that Washington is on the one dollar bill but notably we don’t see either of their faces sullied. Also spared is a Francis Bacon painting with a dark, seated figure between two bloodied 119

carcasses. The figure has a carnal quality, trapped by his unassuageable appetites, and the Joker steps in to stop one of his men from destroying it – “I kinda like this one.” Vicky Vale is confronted by the Joker. He flips through her portfolio of fashion shots and responds, “crap, crap, crap . . .” until he reaches her photo shoot for Time magazine – war photographs of corpses. “Ah, that’s good work. The sculls, the bodies, you give it all . . . oh, I don’t know if it’s art but I

like it.” The Joker goes on to explain what he wants of Vale:

Joker: I was in the bath one day when I realized why it was I was destined for greatness. You know how concerned people are about appearances. This is attractive; that is not. That is all behind me. I now do what other people only dream. I make art until someone dies. You see, I am the world’s first, fully- functioning homicidal artist.

Listen we mustn’t compare ourselves to regular people. We’re artists. For instance, let me challenge you with a little piece I did . . . You will take pictures and record my work. You will join me in the avant garde of the new aesthetics.

Joker has his girlfriend ushered in wearing a mask. When it is removed for the audience, we see that the woman’s face has been badly scared.

Joker: Why is she wearing a mask? Well she’s just a sketch really. You see Miss Vale, Alisha’s been made over in line with my new philosophy and now like me, she’s a living work of art . . . I’m no Picasso but do you like it?

Director, Tim Burton, makes apparent social violence and, in particular, violence against women that has been traditionally rescripted in sanitized museum terms. 120

Batman, of course, arrives to save the day, dramatically crashing in through the skylight. He grabs the frightened woman, staging their exit with an exciting range of technical wizardry, heroic antics and a strong boot to kick out the heavy, steel, front doors. The Joker is left reflecting, “Where does he get those wonderful toys?”

L.A. Story (1991, Columbia Tri Star).

Scenes featuring an art museum.

A television weatherman likes to skate through the Los Angeles County Art Museum when the guards aren’t looking. On the second visit to the museum though, the skating becomes facile and he discovers deeper meaning in his life and true love.

Details of scenes.

This is the story of a “wicky wacky TV weatherman” named Harris K. Telemacher (Steve Martin) whose Los Angeles existence is showy, superficial and emotionally bankrupt. We experience two of his relationships; one with a status-conscious yuppie, and a second with a young valley girl named SanDeE, but we accept that these are merely two in a string of attractive yet shallow relationships. Driving along the L.A. freeways on his way to a 121

stereotypical, L.A. lunch, Harris quotes from Macbeth saying, “life is sound and fury signifying nothing,” and we sympathize with his moment of despair. Harris’ most meaningful relationship to date is with a freeway road conditions sign that blinks “RUOK” (are you OK?) to him one day. He suspects he is on some candid camera type show when the sign asks to be hugged, but obligingly, Harris reaches over and hugs the sign. The first time we see Harris in an art museum, in this case the Los

Angeles County Museum of Art, it is Sunday, March 25, at 2.37pm. The meticulous way in which this moment has been recorded seems strange in the context of the movie but the moment and the art museum are marked as somehow historic. Harris has gone there with a friend, Ariel (another Shakespearean reference - this time an allusion to Ariel in The Tempest, a mischievous spirit), who becomes a co-conspirator in his rascality. As a security officer yawns and wanders off for a coffee break, Harris unleashes wheels from his sneakers and Ariel (Susan Forristal) uncovers a video tape. With the concentrated poise and affectation of an Olympic ice-skater, Harris roller-skates past Old Masters and modern art alike, experiencing disapproval from a painting of a bishop, horror on the face of The Scream and the ruffling of leaves as he passes Van Gogh’s Sunflowers. As they depart from the museum, Harris in voice-over says, “I call it performance art but my friend Ariel calls it wasting time. History will decide.” Harris meets a British journalist, an intelligent, articulate woman (Victoria Tennant) and, more importantly, a woman of character. As a way to get to know her better he offers to take her on a “cultural tour of L.A.”. Harris provides a stinging critique on image-conscious Los Angeles. 122

Harris: Architecture. Some of these buildings are over twenty years old!! This house over here is Greek Revival and they have to revive the Greek every morning who lives in it. And here’s a Tudor mansion and a fourdoor mansion. You know you’re really nobody in L.A. unless you live in a house with a really big door.

They then drive on to the Museum of Musicology where Harris’ tour includes Verdi’s baton, Mozart’s quill and Beethoven’s balls – a glass container holding two wrinkled testicles in preserving fluids. Next, they travel on to the cemetery where “lots of famous people are buried”; Rocky Marciano, Benny Goodman and they find the gravestone of William Shakespeare stating that he had lived in L.A. for a couple of years back in the seventeenth century. These events start to tamper with our expectations of reality. The baton, the quill and the Marciano and Goodman graves are feasible, but such claims of Beethoven’s balls and Shakespeare’s grave strain credibility. We expect museums and gravestones to tell the truth; to be an authority on things. The confusion here is that although we doubt that these things are real, in Los Angeles, home of the Hollywood image factory, we are never quite sure of what has substance and what does not. The borders between fact and fiction, education and entertainment, art and science, fantasy and reality and museum and film become blurry. Our cultural equilibrium is disturbed. Although the cynicism is largely leveled at the city of Los Angeles (after all it is L.A.’s Story) and the L.A. way of life, everything for Harris, including himself is seen as a facade and possibly a fraud. 123

Sarah muses on L.A. to her tape-recorder: “Roland [her partner] thinks that if you turned off the sprinklers it would turn into a desert,” but she is starting to see things slightly differently. “It’s a place where they’ve taken a desert and turned it into their dreams.” The second time we see Harris in the art museum he is once again involved in his roller-skating escapades. He hits a misplaced pool of water and skids out of control into Sarah and Roland (Richard E. Grant) standing before David Hockney’s painting, Mulholland Drive. Roland quips, “Have you tried the Guggenheim?” to which Harris responds, “I get that . . . because it’s circular and goes downhill.” The audience is cued that this is an insider’s joke. Harris knows about the Guggenheim and performance art. He is an “inside the museum” character but, because he is so weary of life as mere mirrors and smoke, he cannot take the museum/life seriously. Mulholland Drive is just another example of “when is a street, not a street.” Sarah asks Harris and Ariel to join them looking at the paintings. W e see the four characters facing a work of art. Harris effuses over the painting that the audience can’t see.

Harris: I like the relationships. I mean each character has its own story. The puppy is a bit too much but you have to overlook things like that in these kinds of paintings. The way he’s holding her – it’s almost filthy. He’s about to kiss her and she’s pulling away. And the legs smashed up against her. Look how he’s painted the blouse – sort of translucent. You can just make out her breasts underneath. And it’s sort of touching him here. [He goes to touch his heart but ends up with his hands in his groin.] It’s really pretty torrid, don’t you think? And then of course, you have the onlookers peeking at them from behind the doorway like they’re all shocked. They wish. Yeah, I must admit when I see a painting like this I get emotionally erect. 124

When the camera provides a 180 degree angle turn, we see the painting is Helen Frankenthaler’s huge red abstraction, Renaissance. This moment marks a renaissance in Harris’ life. His mocking portrayal of modern art and the critic takes a new turn as real passions between Harris and Sarah are suddenly aroused before the flaming red canvas. The moment when the couple finally consummate their love is during a benefit dinner for the successful development of a new private art museum6.

They move outside during the speeches and as they fall to the ground to make love, we hear the voice of the dinner speaker say, “And now, let us all move forward with great enthusiasm to build the greatest private museum in the world.” Harris’ and Sarah’s discovery of profound, emotional experience becomes analogous with the art museum as they build their own sacred “museum” together. Museums are repositories of primal emotions.

Born Yesterday (1993, Hollywood Pictures).

Scene featuring an art museum.

A journalist/academic is hired to educate the Las Vegas showgirl girlfriend of a ruthless businessman in the ways and means of Washington DC elite society. He takes her to the National Gallery of Art as part of her

6 The new private museum is not specifically referred to by name but one can draw a parallel to the construction of the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles - a museum which gained Los Angeles credibility in the art world. 125

education where she has a cathartic experience whilst viewing a Van Gogh painting. The two admit their love for one another in the art museum.

Details of scene.

Born Yesterday is a Walt Disney Company remake of Garson Kanin’s

!940’s play and George Cukor’s film version produced in 1950. Both were a showcase for Judy Holliday who played the role of dumb-blonde, Billie Dawn, on Broadway before going on to win an Oscar for the same role in the film. Disney’s re-presentation of the film suggests a nostalgia for a pre-Civil Rights, pre-Women’s Liberation, romantic Norman Rockwell past; a past when gentlemen preferred blondes and Velvet won the Grand National. Washington Post Staff Writer, Hal Hinson, in his review of March 26, 1993, suggests, “[w]hat the audience gets is charmingly old-fashioned, . . . and rather simple-minded, like a civics lesson aimed at third graders.” Certainly, Disney has made an art of “mak[ing] a claim on the future through its nostalgic view of the past and its construction of public memory as a metonym for the magical kingdom” (Giroux 1996, p. 93). Giroux argues that “[t]hrough the widespread use of public visual space, Disney inserts itself into a network of power relations that promotes the construction of a closed and total world of enchantment, allegedly free from the dynamics of ideology, politics, and power” (1996, p. 92-93). In Born Yesterday, Disney insinuates itself into the high-art limelight of the art museum to enhance its own self-promotion as the maker of dreams come 126 true. The five minute scene where Paul Verrall (Don Johnson) takes Billie Dawn (Melanie Griffith) to an art museum becomes pivotal in righting everyone’s (makes no difference who you are) lives. The Van Gogh painting teaches Billie there is a better way to live her life, watercolor classes will save the corrupt businessman, Harry Brock (John Goodman), and Paul makes a monumental realization that his life will only be complete by marrying Billie whilst standing in the National Gallery.

The films centers around the Pygmalion-like transformations of Billie, a very dumb, very blonde, Las Vegas showgirl who miraculously metamorphesizes into a glamorous, elegant and intelligent swan. In a matter of weeks (or days?) breasts get hidden under stylish Armani suits and replaced by tortoiseshell glasses to signify an abundance of brains not boobs. Billie lives with the bad guy in the film, Harry, a corporate businessman - greedy, corrupt, vulgar and physically violent. Anti-intellectual and xenophobic, Harry none-the-less, in this Disney remake, has some redeeming features. He can dance up a storm and he has an occasional tender moment with Billie. It is important that we know he is capable of redemption if we are to accept his watercolor lead revival. The third key character is an updated Henry Higgins. Paul Verrall emerges as a savvy, political journalist and academic who is hired by Brock to show Billie how to pass in the sophisticated political circles of Washington D.C. The art museum scene which features towards the climatic end of the film, begins with a close-up on an Impressionist landscape. As the camera crosses to pick up on Billie, she begins by suggesting that it “smells good” in the museum and that if she’d “known art smelt this good” she’d have visited 127 a long time ago. By this comment we are lead to believe that Billie doesn’t know much about art but that she is a woman in touch with her senses. Her next comment is offered in excitement as she discovers the Van Gogh painting that cathartically changes her life. It is a scene depicting a small child with his/her parents in a vegetable garden. Billie says, “Wow. God . . . it’s so small but it’s like it’s bigger than the whole room.” Billie expresses the power of art from an uneducated, but not necessarily ignorant, perspective. Paul as connoisseur, looking academic in his tortoiseshell glasses reflects, “Van Gogh painted this near the end of his life. What a shame that he was never recognized while he was still living, don’t you think?” However, the talk soon shifts from art to love and ethics with the following exchange.

Billie: Why didn’t you ever kiss me again? Paul: Well, it’s complicated. Billie: What’s complicated. I mean, either you kiss me or you don’t and you didn’t. Paul: Billie, I’m working for Harry and I’m writing a story about him and you’re living with him. Billie: Then why did you kiss me the first time? Paul: I made a mistake. Billie: Gee, sorry. Paul: Billie, Billie, its not about you. It’s about ethics. If I get involved with you I’m no different than Harry. I don’t want to use you like Harry uses Senators to get what he wants. Billie: You’re crazy about me, aren’t you? Paul: Yes. Billie: That’s why you get so mad at Harry. 128

Paul: I don’t hate Harry. I hate his kind of life and what he does and what he stands for. Harry doesn’t know any better. He’s never thought about anybody else in the world but himself. Billie: Well, who does? Paul: Oh God, Billie. Millions of people do. The whole damn history of the world is the story of the fight between the selfish and the unselfish. Billie: Where do I fit in? Paul: I honestly don’t know. Billie: You still think I’m the kind of person who goes with Harry? Paul: You’re still with him aren’t you? Billie, come on now, be fair. You’re the one who told me that all you wanted out of life was a mink coat and a TV that’d fit in your purse. Billie: Yeah, but that’s why I did all this learning - to change . . .

The audience is cued that Billie has changed and become ethical and humanitarian because she is standing in the sacred site of the art museum. We believe her. She leaves Harry but not before she has arranged his spiritual recovery, also. Harry must take watercolor classes, long walks on the beach and visit the Van Gogh painting in the museum to discover the transcendental truths of life just as she has. She also marries her tutor – good person Paul, and being Disney, they live happily ever after. 129

Absolute Power (1997, Castle Rock International).

Scenes featuring an art museum.

An aging master thief regularly goes to the National Gallery to sketch Old Masters paintings. In the second museum scene he is questioned by a homicide detective on the finer details of stealing and they dine in the museum’s restaurant.

Details of scenes.

The film, Absolute Power, opens with a camera-lead tour through a gallery of Old Masters paintings. Interestingly, the first painting (and the painting that is consistently sketched throughout the film) is of a Franciscan monk in coarse robes and hood gesturing skywards; his eyes fixed upon a tormented Christ figure etched into the clouds. The Franciscan order took their vow of poverty very seriously and stood in opposition to other orders who enjoyed the high life; living on the material riches of the Church. In a struggle between temporal power (the power of the material world, the profane) and spiritual power (the power of God, the sacred), the Franciscan monks rallied against the political might of the Church establishment. This painting provides a hint of the value-based struggles that are about to unfold. The camera then pans across other religious and classical paintings until the title Absolute Power silently is brought up over a painting of an ancient, 130

shimmering civilization. It is not clear which civilization this is, but it is feasible to link the society nestled around a white domed and columned building to the current world superpower, the United States of America – center of the material world. When the room comes into focus, we see many art devotees, quietly sketching. A pretty, young woman starts up a conversation with an elderly man wearing glasses and a cloth cap. He appears frustrated with his drawing

of the monk.

Woman: Don’t give up. Man: Oh, I never do. Woman: May I . . . [look at your drawings] The woman examines his pencil face and hand studies. Woman: You work with your hands, don’t you. The man smiles wryly.

The man in the scene, we come to learn, is Luther Whitney (Clint Eastwood), an aging, master thief providing the visual pun of an Old Master amongst the Old Masters. He smiles wryly because his hands are his craft in picking locks and disconnecting security systems. However, rather than this thief being demonized for his crimes, we immediately know that he is the hero, the moral voice of this movie, the man who will give away his material possessions to take on the corruption of the material world. Reviewer, Peter Rainer, finds the art connection heavy handed when he writes, “If you’re going to be robbed . . . better Luther than some slobbering whippersnapper toting an Uzi. Why, it’s practically an honor to be robbed by Luther. He confers his connoisseurship on you booty” (1997, p. 1). Luther becomes the 131

“inside the art museum” character, and ironically, in this case, the “outside the museum” character is the President of the United States. If the pretty young woman had turned one more page in Luther’s sketch book she would have seen his drawing of a Washington mansion. The sketch is part of the thief’s extensive research for his swansong burglary. Whilst stripping the home of its bounty, Luther is trapped in a secret room with a one-way mirror off the master bedroom. He is forced to sit in a chair and watch as a sexual tryst turns violent. The woman gains the upper hand in the struggle, until two security agents, summoned by the man’s cries, break in and shoot her. It is revealed that the sexual deviant and adulterer is the President, Alan Richmond (Gene Hackman). The thief watches in horror as they clean and cover up the crime but manages to secrete a vital piece of evidence. The video box proclaims:

The body has been hidden. The murder weapon has disappeared. The killer’s identity has been concealed. Two men know the truth. One is a master thief . . . the other is the President of the United States.

The second time we see Luther sketching the Franciscan monk in the art museum, he is approached by a police investigator, Seth Frank (Ed Harris). Frank has done his research on Luther, discovering his war hero status, his time in jail, an only daughter and his reputation as a virtuoso thief. The two men have lunch together in the museum restaurant as the investigator quizzes Luther on how one would go about committing such a crime as the break in to the mansion. In the museum setting, Luther is the master and the 132

policeman, his apprentice. The thief paints a verbal picture for the police officer, part fiction and part fact, but remains in control of the situation at all times. Seth Frank experiences the same kind of frustration that Luther did i n the opening scene when he can’t quite capture the tricks of the Old Master. In this good vs. evil scenario, Luther eventually takes on the most powerful man in the world and wins. He also returns the jewelry he has stolen to the mansion because he is a man of conscience. Moreover, because

of his committed moral crusade, he is re-united with his estranged daughter who begins to see her father in a new light. You are left wondering why, though, with such moral conviction, Luther didn’t come out of the secret room to intervene in the beating and eventual murder of the woman; and equally, why his way of “getting the President” for his crimes involved manipulating a grief-stricken old man into stabbing the highest official in the land.

Analysis of the films.

In my analysis of the five films, I want to frame the texts’ meaning in the mythical bedrock of popular culture and investigate whether the structure of each art museum scene in the films relies pedagogically on recurring patterns of narrative, values and character types. Myths achieve their patterning power (and their assumed audience responses to those patterns) over time and repeated circumstance. Myths can only work intertextually, through a habitual cycle of production and consumption of texts whose features are 133 shaped by those which have gone before. The acceptance of the myths surrounding the art museum, work by recurrence – human interactions, moral deliberations and cathartic moments returning again and again.

Frames on the art museum.

I begin this analysis by locating the Art Museums and their representations in the five films, as summarized in Table 3.

Table 3: Art Museum Locations in the Films

She Devil Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Museum as marker of class.

Batman Make-believe - Flugelheim Museum Museum as civilization.

L.A. Story Los Angeles County Art Museum Museum as passion.

Born Yesterday National Gallery, Washington D.C. Museum as education.

Absolute Power National Gallery, Washington D.C. Museum as moral authority. 134

The art museums featured in the films were mostly “real” art museums. Filmmakers shot in actual galleries and show actual works of art. There are, of course, exceptions to the rules: the Batman film is a set construction; the National Gallery scene in Born Yesterday was filmed in the Los Angeles County Art Museum and the sculptures on the plinths were reproductions; and the sunflower petals that flutter in the wake of Steve Martin’s skating prank are not the work of Van Gogh. However, given the constraints of

Hollywood fiction, there is a sense of authenticity about the art museums portrayed. Even the futuristic Flugelheim Gallery in Batman is filled with recognizable imagery from art history to add credibility. It is important for the viewer to have faith in the art museum; to believe in its cultural purity. Like the church, the art museum in most of the films was portrayed as a sacred site, a place where people experienced a spiritual and/or emotional catharsis. Four of the filmic art museums are representative of the traditional and popular frames (Frames 1 and 3) of how we know art museums. In Born Yesterday, the art museum becomes a place of education for the masses. It provides the setting for Billie to find life’s answers or perhaps, just to start asking some more meaningful questions about her life. Mink coats and money become secondary to a life of love and learning. Equally, for Harris K. Telemacher, the art museum accommodates his discovery of meaning in an otherwise superficial world. It is in the “Greed is Good” Los Angeles of the 1980s that he finds his financial security unnourishing and seeks a passionate life with a woman whose values are not fiscally driven. In Absolute Power, Luther and the Franciscan monk he continually draws in the museum, are on analogous moral missions. Luther is caught in a conflict between the 135

material and spiritual world and, like the monk, he opts for the sainted path. Luther returns the goods he has stolen and finds worth in a renewed relationship with his daughter and a duty of justice. The Batman museum scene likewise provides the setting for a conflict of good versus evil and civilization versus anarchy. Batman’s literal struggles with the Joker are parallel to those of the internal personal struggles of Billie, Harris and Luther. However, one movie remains largely at odds with the others in its representation of the art museum. Ruth Patchett is ostracized in the art museum even though we accept her as a good and moral person. She Devil has been based on a feminist novel and the material is situated squarely in the academic discourses of Frame 2. In almost every aspect of how we view the Guggenheim scene in She Devil, the art museum is demonized as a marker of class, a cultural sorting house, and the sacred values so evident in the other films, are inverted. We no longer view the art museum as elitist in terms of its aspirational/inspirational role (as in the case of Billie, Harris, Luther and Batman) but elitist in the sense of exclusion. Ruth Patchett is a victim of the hierarchical society of which the art museum is emblematic. In a complete reversal of the myth, Ruth chooses the path of the Devil to ultimately become the kind of woman who would seamlessly fit into the art museum clique.7

7As a postscript, it is worth noting here that of all the movies studied, only She Devil was regarded in the review literature as a “box office flop.” It is stretching academic credibility to suggest that the film failed solely because of the characterization of the people in the art museum scene but there does seem to be an element that worked against the grain of the average viewer in this otherwise star-studded film. 136

Insider and outsider characters.

New Museology critics have suggested that the pedagogy of art museums is socially divisive and separates people into insider and outsider status based largely upon one’s class, education and “taste.” I expected to find this evident in the films I viewed but the portrayal of the insider and outsider characters did not necessarily equate with the academic discourse. The stereotypes held

true to form for the minor characters who appeared in the filmic art museums. However, for the pivotal characters, the ones for whom the art museum provided a point of catharsis, their construction was far more complex. They exhibited characteristics from both sides of the binary divide. In many ways, the art museum became a crucible for these key characters and it was only when these characters were passed through the metaphoric flame that they distilled as either pure good or pure evil. In the populist spaces of Frame 3, the trend was optimistic and inclusive. Characters who may not have had all of the prerequisite attributes for insider status but we always felt that they could become one. Poor, uneducated and socially deviant people could become a part of the museum culture. The glaring exception to the rule occurred in the Frame 2-specific She Devil, where you had to sell your soul to the devil to become a museum insider. Earlier in this chapter, I articulated the kinds of characteristics expected of the “typical” art museum insider and outsider in a set of binaries. I proposed that the profile of the idiosyncratic museum insider was seen to be beautiful, wealthy, urban, intelligent, spiritual, extraordinary and have expensive tastes. The outsider was distinguished in less flattering terms as unattractive, poor, 137 suburban, dumb, material, ordinary and have cheap tastes. Given those parameters, the characters roughly can be perceived in the following terms although some characters were ambiguous.

Table 4: Insider and Outsider Characterizations in the Films

She Devil Mary - insider(?) character Ruth - outsider then insider character Bob - insider(?) character

Batman Bruce Wayne/Batman - insider character Joker - believes himself to be insider “we mustn’t compare ourselves to regular people – we’re artists,” but more fittingly, an outsider character Vicky Vale - insider character

L.A. Story Harris - insider(?) then insider character Sarah - insider character

Born Yesterday Billie - outsider then insider character Paul - insider character Harry - outsider character

Absolute Power Luther - insider character President of the United States - outsider char.

Ruth Patchett is the only pivotal character who exhibits all of the outsider characteristics in the list’s entirety. She begins the film as your quintessential art museum outsider and frumps her way through the Guggenheim in her 138

frilly, floral frock, vinyl shoes and plastic beads extolling the virtues of romance novels and more interested in viewing the food display than the art display. Audience sympathy is with Ruth as we watch Bob and Mary flirting but the hapless housewife seems oblivious to her outsider status. We may feel her humiliation, but Ruth seems very happy in the art museum. She enjoys meeting “famous authors” and the silver service. Still, Ruth’s visit to the art museum marks a moment in her life from which point on she will

dramatically change. Ruth Patchett, as the she devil gains power in society through often violent and manipulative means, accumulating wealth, and dramatically changing her appearance (in the novel it is through extensive plastic surgery). Ruth Patchett becomes an art museum “insider” but in this academic frame, being an insider is demonized. In contrast, the other films show more pliancy in the characterization of the crucial characters. For example, the Disney representation of Billie Dawn is a woman who clearly unsettles the stereotypical expectation. Billie is a Las Vegas showgirl and kept girlfriend who is distinguished by her materialness and a lack of intelligence but she is also very attractive, wealthy (by association), urban, extraordinary and with expensive tastes for mink coats and new technology. Luther Whitney exhibits most of the listed characteristics for an art museum insider and yet he is a thief with a prison record and lives in small, cheap accommodation. Harris K. Telemacher has the material trappings associated with the insider character but no spirituality. As they pass through the museum crucible they are all transformed into better people; people we like and want to emulate. 139

More paradoxical though, is the notion of insider and outsider positionality in the Batman movie. In the cartoon world of Batman and the Joker, cartoon stereotypes hold true to form as Batman is undeniably good and the Joker, undeniably bad. However, separating the insider from the outsider according to the predicated binaries becomes problematic. The art museum in Batman provides a fitting location for the mythic animal contest between two males struggling for supremacy and out to mate with the girl, in this case, Vicki Vale. The notion of insider and outsider status though, is blurry because both of these men have wealth, education and a high degree of power. They are leaders, live urban existences and show innate cunning and intelligence. If we are to decide which man has the more sophisticated tastes to enter an art museum, we are left with a choice between a man in a bat outfit and another in a joker suit! It is only in the mythic intangible realms, the narratives of good and evil, life and death, and heaven and hell that we can make the distinction between the two men and which belongs in art museum history alongside the portraits of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.

Violence and the art museum.

In the introduction to this chapter, I raised the idea that the public art museum is historically-rooted with acts of violence. The French Revolution poignantly illustrated the seemingly limitless human capacity for cruelty and bloodshed at the same time paintings of wars, mythic battles and conflict 140

became aggrandized and romanticized emblems of a noble, cultural heritage. We see a similar paradoxical chasm evolve in the twentieth century as films provide cinematic contests that are distanced from the seedy reality of day to day violence by their color-soaked and heroic representations. In particular though, I want to address here how violence is pedagogically framed in the context of an art museum. Why do directors choose to film violent acts in the art museum? Why not in an abattoir or at a stadium? Does the art museum legitimate the violence like it legitimates certain people in its spaces or are we outraged at having the violence made visible in our sacred shrine? Do we enjoy the violence in the art museum because it delivers some kind of power or agency to the viewer to desecrate a sacred site? It all depends on whose frame you are using to look at it. Listed below are the violent acts performed in the art museum but I also want to discuss how violence is dealt with at other points in the films by the insiders and outsiders of the museum. 141

Table 5: Violent Characters and Violence in the Art Museum Scenes

She Devil

Batman The Joker and his henchmen murder many people in the art museum with a poisonous purple gas. The Joker responds favorably to images of violence. The Joker has inflicted facial scarring on the face of his girlfriend. The Joker wants to make homicidal art that involves killing people.

L.A. Story

Born Yesterday Harry is physically violent to Billie.

Absolute Power Luther watches a murder and incites someone else to commit murder.

My personal reaction to the art museum scene in Batman was largely one of abhorrence. I could barely cope with the multiple viewings necessary for writing this analysis. I viewed the scene as dark and despairing, full of senseless killings, and felt claustrophobically forced into the same space with an insane and dangerous psychopath. It was therefore unsettling for me to read one young on-line reviewer’s statement that:

One of the funniest parts of the movie is when the Joker is in an art gallery with his goons, on the way to Ms. Vale. One of them is carrying a boom box . . . and watching the Joker and his goons caper and dance about is worth the price of admission itself. (Kramer 1989, p. 2) 142

By the email address at the end of the article, I can assume that the reviewer, Steve Kramer, is a young, male, University student. Kramer found the scene very funny, full of “caper and dance,” and a highlight of the film. It is a moment such as this, that forces you to see the variant ways we name, define and legitimate how anything is framed. Assuming the academic high ground here is unproductive, and speaking for young men in general, is mere

ventriloquism but it is important to acknowledge that there is more than one frame engaged here. Late twentieth century existence in the United States is marked by escalating schoolyard violence and terrorism (largely perpetrated by white males); a scarcity of real opportunities in the workforce; and a social system that views youth only in terms of being a potential marketing subgroup. Does a proportion of the target market of this film, 10 to 25 year old males, view this scene in terms of the Joker as Hero – the Joker as a resistance fighter against a largely indifferent and compassionless Establishment? Do they associate more closely with the ugly loser rather than the suave billionaire, Bruce Wayne? In their frustration and social impotence, do they cheer and laugh when dead bodies of rich people litter the ground and society’s “treasures” are smashed? Is the idea of throwing paint on works of art something that actually looks like good fun? The heuristic model that underpins this study posits the art museum in popular culture as sacred and inclusive. Through my own personal frame, I despise the actions of the Joker because he is smashing up my sacred site. Equally, through another frame it may be funny for the Joker to wreak such 143 havoc, but the underlying premise still remains that the art museum is sacred. It is only a moment of rebellion, of notoriety, if we attack something that is truly sacred/special to us. Art museums fulfill similar spiritual needs to that of churches. Oliver Cromwell understood this notion of the cultural inviolability of certain objects when he used the churches in England to stable his horses. He desecrated the churches by smashing the statues and the stained glass windows and allowed his animals to defecate in the sacred space.

If the church/art museum can be desecrated or conquered, it delivers the conqueror some kind of power, of agency. Adolescent males, by cheering on the Joker, are exercising their own power. They claim the space to do with it what they wish. In the process, they also make the art museum inclusive because it is no longer run by the “priests.” It becomes theirs. It is more difficult to rationalize or be sympathetic to alternative perspectives when viewing The Joker’s violent attack on his girlfriend; a woman whom he has sadistically disfigured for failing to follow his rules. Her descent into drugs and life behind a mask seems sadly to parallel a talkshow-frenzied society hungry for details of women as victims, and a culture of women on tranquilizers and diet pills. Joker calls her scarred face a work of art, or rather a sketch, indicating that it is not finished and that there is more to come. In his “homicidal art,” death seems her inevitable fate. This is misogyny at its most contemptible. The very tragic thing about this is that the woman’s disfigurement is an incidental moment in the film. Her face is used as a shock tactic, not for a moment of empathy. We are given no time to reflect on her personal despair, only the immediacy of the moment. In fact, we become primarily concerned with the safety of Vicky Vale (the beautiful 144

one) and experience only a passing contempt for the unattractive and defiled woman. Excessive violence is valorized in the film as dozens of people are killed in the art museum and the audience is never given the opportunity to reflect on the carnage that they witness. Bodies are nameless extras, stepped over both literally and metaphorically. Like the biblical “sacrificial lambs” these people die so that others may live. Vicky Vale is handed a package containing a gas mask moments before the poisonous purple gas kills the museum crowd. Holding her modern day paschal symbol (the blood of the slaughtered lamb painted on the doors of the Jewish people) over her face, the wrath of God passes over her and she becomes one of the chosen people. The Judeo- Christian religions have always seen their followers as somehow “special” and Vicky Vale, like a beautiful oil painting, is marked as worthy of saving. The notion of the Joker’s “homicidal art,” where he makes art until someone dies, provides us with the shadow side of the art museum psyche. The language of academic discourses would have us believe that “making art until someone dies” is a truly loathsome pursuit and one antithetical to the values espoused by the “priests” of the art museum. However, from another frame the violent means used to build and stock the famous art museums of the world are made visible. It is said that the art museum and the guillotine were invented at the same time. As the heads of the aristocracy rolled into wicker baskets during the French Revolution, the confiscated spoils from their estates became the contents of the Louvre at the other end of the Tuileries Gardens. Other cultures, violently invaded and colonized, have had their art and sacred objects taken for art museum display. “Homicidal 145

art” and its place in the art museum, all depends of whose frame you use to look at it. I also want to raise a particularly violent scene that occurred in the film Absolute Power. Although it did not occur in an art museum setting, the central character of Luther is so strongly identified with the values of the art museum throughout the film, that it becomes relevant when he sits and views a woman being brutally beaten and ultimately murdered and he does

nothing to stop it. He sits in a secret room with a one-way mirror and voyeuristically takes in the incident like watching pornography on television. The film is constructed around Luther as the art-loving, good guy; the moral voice of the film. He spends most of the film chasing justice for the slain woman but why didn’t he come to the aid of the woman in the first place? Why did he remain so mutely fascinated by the scene he was watching rather than act to stop the violence. The film sentimentalizes Luther’s character because of his close association with the art museum and when he views the violent death of the woman, his concern does nothing for the apparent object of his concern, and is really rather solipsistic and self-promoting. In many ways, Luther, along with the sculptural display of cadavers in the Batman scene, are metaphors for the art museum’s moral ambiguity towards violence. Likewise Born Yesterday is a Disney film that has its own share of violence perpetrated against women. Harry, a Donald Trump mentality attached to a Donald Duck temper, dominates his girlfriend with gifts and bribes but also with his fists. There is one particularly brutal scene where he beats Billie into submission to sign some papers. In this otherwise Pollyanna 146

film, Billie finds the antidote to Harry’s violence in three epiphanous minutes in an art museum. A small Van Gogh painting illustrating a happy family sets her on the path to leaving Harry and to personal tranquillity. Violence in this context reconfirms the traditional pedagogical frames of the art museum as a site of education and salvation. However, numerous questions remain. Do such violent representations against women help make violence a legitimate option for young males? Do women in violent

domestic situations cheer when they see Billie leave her partner and gain the strength to leave their own savage partners? Is Billie’s moment of empowerment in the art museum a sanitized, Disney narrative or can the reflective, human and sacred spaces of the art museum really inspire change and personal agency? Or is it all of the above?

Love and the art museum.

I have continually suggested throughout this study that the art museum holds a sacred place in people’s lives and drawn analogies with the Christian Church. When it comes to matters of human love, though, the concept of a sacred place still seems pertinent but pedagogical analogies between love in the Church and love in the art museum are erroneous. The Church represents disembodied love; the struggle between flesh and soul. The prominent love relationships in Christian pedagogy are therefore those between God and his “children,” Father and Son and the Mother and Son. We also see this incorporeal love personified in the husband and wife 147

relationship of Mary and Joseph; Jesus being born of a Virgin, and even moreso in the relationship between Jesus and Mary Magdelaine. Mary Magdelaine, the whore, is made clean by her pure and bodiless love of Jesus and she rises above the tawdry flesh that would drag her down into Hell. Representations of the human body in the church building itself, are also indicative of a lack of carnality and physical pleasure. The only nakedness on show is the portly cherubs whose asexuality is overt, and the semi-nakedness

of the emaciated Christ figure on the crucifix. His body writhes in pain and torment, paying for the physical sins of humanity. Is it any wonder then, that church patrons fix their eyes upon the alter and to God in Heaven and not upon the consequences of such human activities as lust. During Medieval times, church authorities even went so far as to strip its architecture of all “false gods” and images so that the people couldn’t adore something that was material or physically here. This is not to say that the Church does not delineate love between men and women on some level because in Western culture people traditionally choose to get married in a church under the sacred covenants of the Church. Love in the Church, though, is an institutional kind of love bound to a set of ideologies and cultural rules. Marriage is a contract, in both the legal and spiritual terms. In the realms of Frame 3, in the texts of popular culture, we never see people actually fall in love in the Church. The Church marks the consecration of love but not its passions ignited. Antithetically, the art museum is a senate environment. In the art museum, beautiful, naked and erotic bodies abound and there is no antagonism between the flesh and the spirit. The transcendental is not 148 separated from the material and the flesh can embody the primordial values of love. In the art museum, the objects become personified, for example, paintings can personify beauty. People can find love in the art museum because it is a human, sensate love and a profound love because it has an aesthetic to it. It is therefore not surprising that scenes of finding true love in the art museum are prolific in the realms of Frame 3. In the five movies under scrutiny, flirting, romantic trysts, double entendre conversation, sexual foreplay and proclamations of true love prevail.

Table 6: True Love in the Art Museum

She Devil Bob meets Mary in the art museum and then leaves his wife for her. Eventually, he sees the error of his ways and returns to Ruth.

Batman Vicky Vale choose Batman (true love) over The Joker (depraved love) in the art museum.

L.A. Story Harris and Sarah engage in a profound, emotional relationship after visiting the art museum (true love).

Born Yesterday Billie and Paul discuss their love for one another in the art museum. Billie then leaves Harry (debased love) for Paul (true love).

Absolute Power 149

In the list of insider/outsider binaries delineated earlier in the chapter, I wrote that the body was represented inside the art museum as nude, sensual, virtuous, graceful and non-violent. The emotional conditions were characterized by such words as nourishment, exhilaration and acceptance. We perceive of the art museum as the perfect crucible to distill pure love from the flames of passion. We no longer see ourselves as clumsy, unworthy, foolish or sinful when we can view our love and lovemaking within the frame of the house of beauty; the art museum. In the art museum, we are beautiful and worthy of love, too. Our bodies are lithe like Rodin’s lovers coiled together and sensuous in the passionate embrace of Klimt’s kisses. We are covered in gold leaf, in Bacchanalian splendor and flow into one another’s bodies like warm red wine. Harris sees only heat, lust and a torn hymen in the red canvas of Frankenthaler’s Renaissance as he stands before it with Sarah. His formalist art narrative offers an erotic foreplay to the ultimate consummation of their love. Sarah instinctively understands that the art criticism offered by Harris is a thinly veiled likening of what is to happen between them in the flesh. When they finally make love, the off-screen voice states “[a]nd now, let us all move forward with great enthusiasm to build the greatest private museum in the world” and we, the audience, know their lovemaking is divine and not uncomfortable and awkward on the rocky ground outside the fundraising dinner. Even though we don’t see it onscreen, we imagine their lovemaking as nude, sensual, virtuous, graceful and non-violent. They are creating a sacred, nourishing and exhilarating place full of all the secrets and wonders of 150 the world. Their lovemaking becomes synonymous with the treasure houses we create. So too, are romantic scripts of love played out between Billie and Paul and Batman and Vicky Vale in the art museum setting. Billie pushes Paul as to why he hasn’t kissed her again. He explains that it is a matter of ethics; he wants to kiss her but she is with Harry and Harry is his boss. Next time he kisses her it will be a Rodin kiss, a Klimt kiss. They will be doing the “right and proper” thing, both free to act on the passion that smolders between them in the museum scene. Batman and Vicky Vale’s relationship is firmly cast in the melodrama traditions of the woman tied to the train track by the dastardly villain. She is rescued just in the knick of time by the handsome hero and they live happily ever after. Feminist frustration at such female-dependent-on-male narratives is understandable here but the paradox is that Vicky Vale is your consummate feminist, career woman and we cheer regardless when she is swept up in the arms of her dark knight in shining armor. However, a punitive spirit dominates She Devil and sexual arousal is seen as something to be punished. In the Frame 2 romantic encounter of the She Devil art museum, love is demonized. This is not true love; this is infidelity. As Bob and Mary begin their adulterous liaison in the Guggenheim Museum we witness both an inversion of the hallowed symbolism traditionally associated with the art museum (the art museum, in this case, does not consecrate the love of the couple) and a reinforcement of its sacred role (our moral benchmark is in conflict with the actions taking place). Conservative values are evident; marriage should be sacred, but this is 151

also a profane frame of palpable human relationships. Bodies in this museum frame are eroticized objects and attempts at human junction are presented as promiscuous and clumsy. As surely as Bob and Mary will have sexual intercourse; they surely will be punished for their sins of the flesh. Interestingly, Ruth Patchett also denounces the flesh as she chooses power over love.

Gender constructions and the art museum.

Whilst I do accept that art museums have an implicit and at times explicit political pedagogy, one that co-operates in the teaching of male dominance, it is problematic to believe in a simple political or ideological template superimposed on a complicated cultural artifact such as the art museum. Equally misleading is the seemingly obvious links that we make between a particular cultural narrative and a particular ideological position. It is for this reason that we must be careful in the gender stereotyping that at first seems obvious in the representation of women and men in these films. Certainly, getting a man appears central to the representation of women in the art museum setting, and so too, is societal anticipation of beauty, but the women in these scenes, by and large, have agency in their transactions with the men. What is less visible unless we turn variant frames onto the art museum is that men are likewise presented in terms of getting a woman and controlled by social expectations of beauty. The especial gender difference, though, is marked by the way men have far less agency and/or success in their 152

transactions with the women in these scenes. In this section, I want to address the paradox in the gender definitions of these films.

Table 7: Female Characters in the Art Museum

She Devil Ruth (outsider character) is suburban, unattractive, overweight, cheap tastes, uneducated and unconfident. Mary (insider character) is beautiful, wealthy, a successful writer, self-centered and a husband-stealer.

Batman Vicki Vale (insider character) is beautiful, educated, well-traveled, sophisticated and a talented photographer/journalist.

L.A. Story Sarah (insider character) is attractive, intelligent, educated, well traveled and a successful journalist.

Born Yesterday Billie (outsider then insider character) was a dumb, uneducated, materialistic, unsophisticated Las Vegas showgirl before becoming well-read, well-groomed and thoughtful.

Absolute Power

I watched Born Yesterday with my niece and her friend. The comments made about Billie Dawn by the two twelve year old girls were completely unanticipated. Billie was not perceived as a victim of her economic 153

disadvantage. Rather, the girls saw her as very much in control at each stage of her life; that she made independent choices that furthered the comfort of her life; and that she had a “take no prisoners” approach to getting what she wanted. This was very much at odds with the film narrative that suggested she had been forced into being a showgirl because of a poor family upbringing and lack of education; that she took up with Harry because she knew no better; and that she ultimately saw the light when she discovered learning

and the ethical, investigative journalist, Paul. Contrary to this position, the young girls read it in these terms: the John Goodman (Harry) character may have been rich but he was overweight and unattractive and that the smooth looking and talking Don Johnson (Paul) was the much better catch. John Goodman, they thought, was more suited to his overweight, television wife, Roseanne. Through Frame 2, the narrative interpretation posits Billie leaving one man who controlled her life for another man who would control her life. Indeed, Billie makes no effort to get a job; she just changes her flashy clothes to Armani suits and tortoiseshell glasses and moves on. The everyday practice of taking pleasure into one’s own hands is very much a concern of Billie’s and taking pleasure, despite the often negative, societal associations with the activity, means claiming one’s own body and life. In many ways, Billie is one of life’s winners: she was born good looking and very mateable. She is not forced to work at some poorly paid job; in fact, she doesn’t have to work at all if she doesn’t want to. She has the gender game worked out and the Van Gogh painting is not so much about “the happy family she never had” but pushing the right emotional buttons with her good-looking tutor. 154

In this formula fiction, the issues become highly codified but essentially provide predictable variations on the human instinct to mate or perish. In contrast, to the clearly material girl, Billie Dawn, Vicky Vale (constantly referred to in the review literature as Ms. Vale) is an independent and sophisticated, career woman. Ms. Vale is the idealized 80s feminist woman who has been rewarded and recognized for her career performance in the public sphere. Sarah, in L.A. Story, is also a model of Frame 2 feminism.

She comes with the added cultivation of a Frame 1 European heritage and accent. Like Ms. Vale, she has been described in the popular literature as an “investigative journalist”(certainly a popular filmic career!) and is well- traveled. What seems inconsistent with this feminist representation of the two women is how quickly they become dependent on men. Vale becomes whimpering when confronted with the Joker in the art museum scene and has to be rescued by the contemporary knight, Batman. Sarah, like trashy Billie, only makes the move from one man to another. The second man, of course, is better looking. If we are searching for a common theme here, it seems to be that all three women nominate, value and regulate their own pleasure; view men on the basis of appearance; and create chameleon changes from independent women to damsels in need of rescue as suits their needs. In Batman, L.A. Story and Born Yesterday we see two men vying for the affections of one woman. Only the contrary She-Devil narrative has two women vying for the love of one man. In all four films though, the central women have the agency to make choices about their lives (Vicky, Sarah and Billie choose their man and Ruth chooses life on her own). If we examine the two men fighting over the one woman scenarios, however, we start to see 155

a rubric of clear winners and losers emerge. Only fifty percent of the men succeed in the films (in She-Devil, the social success rate for male characters is zero) and those winners are selected largely on culturally accepted standards of male good looks. This is particularly evident with the charismatic Batman and the disfigured and paunchy Joker, but also obvious if we compare the competitors of handsome Paul and overweight Harry, slim and athletic Luther and the beer bellied President, and adventurous, good looking Harris and the thin, pale, Roland. The slightly tongue-in-cheek quality of the Batman movie that posits Batman as hero is really not all that far removed from the hero status afforded the winners in these films. The losers of the films suffer horrible and often bloody fates (Joker, the President), humiliation (Harry) and banishment (Roland, Bob). We have become so politically sensitive to the representation of women in art museums as mere sexual objects that little academic reframing has been applied to the representation of men; apparently content to accept the traditional Frame 1 art historical view of men as society’s winners. What are the pedagogical issues of these Frame 3 art museums scenes where males are selected in terms of beauty and are repeatedly forced into battle to achieve success? For every painting of a victorious male warrior with his sword, there is his unrecorded foe lying bloodied in the mud somewhere else. The hi-tech battle between Batman and the Joker in the art museum setting simply provides an explicit enactment of the often hidden agenda. The thing that struck me so strongly when looking at the men in the film museum scenes was how little control they had in relation to the woman. It was never the man’s choice, no matter how rich or powerful he might be. 156

Table 8: Male Characters in the Art Museum

She Devil Bob (insider(?) character) is suburban, somewhat educated, attractive, weak, unfaithful.

Batman Bruce Wayne/Batman (insider character) is physically fit, intelligent, extremely wealthy, a crusader against crime. Jack Napier/The Joker (outsider character) is facially disfigured, violent, criminal, corrupt and insane.

L.A. Story Harris (insider character) is attractive, intelligent, well educated (quotes Shakespeare), well-groomed and funny. Roland (insider character) is thin, insipid, well educated, well groomed and cynical.

Born Yesterday Paul (insider character) is an intellectual, bookish, wears glasses, and handsome, reports the truth, teaches about ethics. Harry (outside character) is overweight, aggressive, bullying and corrupt. A business man who uses bribery and illegal practices.

Absolute Power Luther (insider character) is passionate about art, physically fit, good looking, brilliant mind, loving father. President of the United States (outsider character) is sexually unfaithful, violent, unattractive, manipulative. 157

This notion of male combat promotes a selective blindness, one that it took me a long time to discover even in my own table. The winner is never viewed in terms of being violent but the loser almost always is. Batman is involved in multiple acts of heinous violence but I haven’t listed him as a violent character. Luther commits a man to murder another and yet only the President is listed as violent in this contest. Harry is seen as violent but Paul, as bookish. The pedagogy of the art museum is surely about winners and

losers but to suggest that all men (even all white, heterosexual, middle/upper class men) are the winners is to be trapped in a singular frame.

Wishes and the art museum.

Walt Disney built a multi-billion dollar industry with an astute understanding of the role of wishing in our culture. He expressed this subliminal desire in the lyrics of his sentimental, theme song: “When you wish upon a star, makes no difference who you are, when you wish upon a star, your dreams come true.” Particularly shrewd, was the way that Disney was non-specific about what our dreams actually involve. There is an underlying assumption that it is the American Dream to which he alludes but in the Disney theme parks, he provides a location where the nervous and timid can wander the wild, wild West; the beer-bellied can scale mountains; and the tone deaf can sing along with chipmunks. He instinctively comprehended that all our dreams and wishes are not the same but having 158

said that, he built such an effective fantasyland realization of the American Dream that we came to believe that it was what we wanted after all. Ralph Rugoff provides an alternative vision of the Disney theme parks, imagining them at the divine hands of controversial author, J.G. Ballard8.

If J.G. Ballard were God, you could safely assume that Donald Duck gangsters and Snow White neo-Nazis would one day overrun Disneyland, turning the monorail into a drive-by shooting range. A boarded-up Main Street would be home to Skid Row dwarves getting high on half-pints of ‘Goofy’ or some other potent Walt whiskey, while hookers in Mickey and Minnie outfits would service visiting fetishists, even taking off their white gloves for an additional fee. (1995, p. 15)

Even though some would be horrified at the prospect of Mickey and Minnie hookers, Rugoff reminds us that “taking off their white gloves for an additional fee,” like the removed condom, can provide enormous pleasures for others. Somewhere along the continuum between the cling-wrapped and fabricated perfection of the Disney world and the cynical Ballardian anti-view, lies the contrary nature of wishing in our society. I wrote in the introduction to this chapter that the art museum expresses life’s intangibles – the things we feel but may not always want to articulate – and becomes the intermediary between human barbarism and human civility. In the Disney film, Born Yesterday, Billie’s wish for a “happy family” is framed in the art museum but so too is the somewhat psychotic dream of the Joker in Batman to kill people. It is easy for us to become judgmental here and state that one act is highly evolved and the other is primitive and

8 J.G. Ballard is an author of part science fact and part science fiction novels. His is perhaps best known for his most controversial book Crash and the subsequent banning of the film based on the book. 159

uncivilized but our human culture has mobilized on wars and violent, physical struggles for power in equal parts to the sexual drive to procreate. The art museum provides a monumental farrago of images and objects, which when exposed together, smother the traces of history we don’t want to acknowledge and yet paradoxically, repackage what we subconsciously already know.

Table 9: Dreams/Wishes and the Art Museum

She Devil

Batman Joker: I now do what other people only dream. I make art until someone dies.

L.A. Story Sarah: It’s a place where they’ve taken a desert and turned it into their dreams.

Born Yesterday Billie: My mother died when I was little and my Dad raised me and my brothers and he loved us so much but I never knew a world like that (referring to a scene of a happy loving family in a Van Gogh painting).

Absolute Power

Sarah talks of Los Angeles as a place where people have taken a desert and turned it into their dreams. In many ways, the act of dreaming in this comment is synonymous with the construction of the art museum itself. 160

Barren and empty humanity has built an art museum as a kind of three dimensional photograph; a photograph that allows you access to your dreams. Rugoff explores this idea further when he suggests that “life may be lived to accumulate documentation of another more exotic existence, which one never has to actually lead” (1995 p. 14). Indeed, the art museum allows us to see ourselves as heroic, as noble and as worthy of a marker in human history. The point to be made here is that wishes/dreams are not easy to quantify and define because the wishes and dreams of people are as many and varied as the people themselves. It is therefore equally absurd to try and define the specific pedagogy of art museums because, as receptacles of our dreams and wishes, they teach different things to different people. On some level, we accept that art museums are sacred. Filmmakers accept they are important cultural markers and are quick to use them in framing certain social interactions. However, my reading of, and the lessons I learn from viewing the art museum scene in Batman could be completely different from the person sitting beside me in the cinema. New museologist writings from the realms of Frame 2 that purport the art museum is soon to be in ruins, dead, irrelevant or absorbed into more contemporary and relevant vehicles, miss the point. Kevin Moore argues in Museums and Popular Culture that the most overpowering trend in the museum world is the development of theme parks. He suggests that theme parks are becoming real rivals to art museums because they now offer more in terms of historical content, formal exhibits and collections.

The ultimate example is Disney, which at its Epcot centre has established national pavilions for a range of countries which display collections loaned from some of the most prestigious museums in 161

the world, including the Louvre, the Hermitage and the CMC [Canadian Museum of Civilization] . . . (1997, p. 149)

He also contends that the art museum has a lot to learn from theme parks such as Disneyland because they earn a lot of money, attract huge audiences and have high presentation and customer service. What Moore can’t see in this statement is that theme parks wouldn’t be borrowing from art museums if they thought art museums were esoteric and dead. Even Disney management comprehends that having something from the art museum somehow enhances their own ventures; shows that they own a treasured piece of the sacred. The theme parks are like the films explored in this chapter: they aren’t art museums, they just borrow what it is they want from the art museum. People who visit theme parks and cinemas don’t have to visit art museums because they already have them in their lives but that doesn’t mean that art museums are irrelevant. Art museums are not dead or irrelevant but they are mutating and slipping into the world of popular culture. The grand built structures are metaphorically being broken up and “sold off” so that all people can now “own” a part of the art museum. Monarchies, governments and wealthy art patrons are not responsible for this transformation; nor are museum workers who are working to make museums more user-friendly. The everyday people of the market have forced the changes. We can purchase art and art museums now via postcards, T Shirts, coffee cups, ties and the like. We can partake of its rituals through film and television. Popular culture has reclaimed the dreams and miracles that art museums represent for the masses. Democracy, in this instance, has worked. Art museums don’t just 162

express the hopes of rich people, of men, of educated people, of Walt Disney; they express all human hopes and we now have affordable access to them.

In conclusion.

The art museum is never inert and never complete. It doesn’t have a

homogenous message for a homogenous society but a multitude of pedagogies that help us explore our sexuality, our conscience and our struggles to survive. In the films I critiqued, one pedagogy of the art museum suggested that there were definite insiders and outsiders in society but that you could overcome the barriers and become an insider through moral and ethical endeavor. The filmic art museum offered its own version of religious teachings; of good versus evil. Equally, it taught us that if you are not an insider, you must desecrate the sacred sites of others to decree one’s power. Pedagogic museum frames variously promoted that love is sensuous, romantic and enduring; infidelity is exciting; infidelity is wrong and you will be punished for your sins; and that there are some people who “naturally” belong together. Violence is promoted as a part of the male culture both for good men and evil; murder is acceptable if perpetrated by an ethical person; vandalism can be funny; women are beaten by men; men are beaten by men; and some people are sacrificed so that others may survive. Women beguile men; women have a choice but men must fight for women; fat people belong with other fat people; and good looking people usually win. The art 163

museums in films provide a place where we make sacred vows; where we kill; and where we seek personal transformation. The pedagogies of the art museum are now culturally transmitted through entertainment; modeled by Hollywood stars; and can be received in the private spaces of our own homes. Through film, the art museum is seared into the mind by colorful moving pictures and has become drenched in meaning even if we never attend an actual museum. Film did not make the art museum, but it has been responsible for remaking it in a form that all people can access. In the filmic domain, when we have the art museum on our side, our dreams are met; we are graceful and successful in life; we win life’s battles; and we are blinded to our own crudities and animalism. In its best moments, the filmic art museum engages us in the devout values of duty, community and hope. If academics tell us that only rich, educated and powerful people attend the art museum on a regular basis, these films respond: so what! 164

Chapter Four

FRAME 4: CONSTRUCTING, DECONSTRUCTING AND RECONSTRUCTING THE FRAME

Curiously enough, the dolphins had long known of the impending destruction of the planet Earth and had made many attempts to alert mankind to the danger; but most of their communications were misinterpreted as amusing attempts to punch footballs or whistle for titbits, so they eventually gave up and left the Earth by their own means shortly before the Vogons arrived.

The last ever dolphin message was misinterpreted as a surprisingly sophisticated attempt to do a double-backwards-somersault through a hoop whilst whistling the ‘Star Spangled Banner’, but in fact the message was this: So long and thanks for all the fish. (Adams, 1979, p. 119)

This final chapter is cautioned by another modern-day parable from Douglas Adams’ Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy. It offers a timely reminder that academic discourses which position the art museum/museologists in the center and those marginal to it as cute but irrelevant, may not always provide the most recondite window on the visual world. Indeed, the wry quip by the dolphins, “so long and thanks for all the fish,” may have more pedagogical significance than we care to realize. The art museum “priests” have for centuries avoided listening to the words spoken beyond the tower. The language of academic discourse is so embedded in its own world that it is 165 oblivious to what is happening outside. The art museum, though, has slowly and surreptitiously been de-institutionalized and our sacred images and objects are no longer stored exclusively within its compound. The art museum has been appropriated by popular culture. It is still a sacred place but people have found a way to link up with their own God, getting by without the trappings of the institution, its language and with no reference to its “priests.”

Gnostic tradition says that there will be no intermediaries between people and their God/sacred place, and indeed, the pleasure is now to be found in having the sacred surround us in our everyday environment. The art museum, situated as it is in the new neighborhood of a global community, has been warped in emerging communication technologies and comes to us now in many familiar shapes and forms. The art museum is on television, on billboards, online. No one person has a franchise on the art museum. No one frame determines what the art museum is to all people. The art museum and its pedagogy, is as diverse as the people who know it. The pedagogy of the art museum becomes a multitude of pedagogies when the academic intermediaries, defining the boundaries, are gone. In chapter 4 I revisit, renegotiate and reconstruct the frames on the art museum discussed in earlier chapters. I take the four frames and look at them again; this time in pedagogical terms for art educators. These are not frames set in stone, but works in progress. They are a struggle; a process of negotiation and reconciliation; a prosecution and defense; old frames rescripted into new frames. 166

POPULAR CULTURE TO RELISH A cultural dialogue at the level of everyday life. Dynamic and shifting. Mobilizing personal desires. Reproductive technologies. Human sensation.

CRITICAL RESISTANCE HISTORICAL MEMORY TO CONTEND TO BRIDGE The right to openly contest Our connection to the past and refigure the construction and to future generations. of pre-existing benchmarks. Faith in civilization To strive and fight. beyond our own existence. Critical cultural analysis. A cultural benchmark. Human shame. Human pride.

FRAMES WITHIN FRAMES THE PARADOX Accommodates multiple paradigms. All frames co-exist but none are mutually exclusive or more important than any other. Translation & mediation across frames. Vital, contentious and paradoxical.

Figure 11: Pedagogy across the Frames

Frame 1 rescripts the traditions of art history into a notion of historical memory that links us to our human forebears and future descendants. Its focus is not on art timelines or styles and periods but on human connection, 167 religious transcendence, cultural benchmarks and reverence for the material achievements of our species. This frame acknowledges that the art museum fulfills a sacred role in our culture. Frame 2 advocates the interrogatory practices of critique; developing pedagogies for a critical visual literacy and social intercourse. Criticism and oppositional resistance are an integral part of a healthy democracy and counterbalance the sometimes self-congratulatory tendencies and residual romanticism of Frame 1. This frame supports the cultural role of contention. Frame 3 explores the concept of relishing something in mundane visual experiences. It looks at the dynamic and shifting spaces of popular culture including fashion, TV and films, music, mass-circulation books and magazines, sports and games, tourism and the hyperreal realm of cyberspace. It makes accessible the new technologies of visual communication as tools of creation and social debate. This frame accepts that academic discourses on art and art museums are not the only way to know our visual culture and consciously seeks aberrant and popular alternatives. Frame 4 is not a physical frame but more of a state of mind that accommodates this notion of multiple frames. It acknowledges that we can know the art museum in many ways – as a link to our cultural ancestry (Frame 1); as part of an intellectual, social debate (Frame 2); as a part of our daily popular and mass-media experience (Frame 3) – or all of the above and more. In Frame 4 all the frames co-exist but none are mutually exclusive nor more important than any other. It is a paradoxical framework in that it is at the one time characterized by permeability between the frames and their underlying notions of pedagogy 168

but simultaneously characterized by the incommensurability between the frames. For example, I am looking through an academic frame at the art museum by writing this dissertation. I will never be able to fully address the pedagogies of alternative frames (such as in Frame 3, the realms of Popular Culture) because I will only be an academic looking through their frame trying to inform my frame. I need to give up on the notion that I can get it completely right because the frames have no common measure. What I write here is meaningless to an adolescent boy watching Batman and cheering on the Joker in his rampage through the art museum. Paradoxically, though, I go to the same cinema, buy the same popcorn and sit alongside him in the darkened rows and cheer at Batman’s victory in stopping the Joker’s rampage. I also add a heedful warning here. Don’t look for definitive answers in the final fourth frame of this final fourth chapter. Your academic training will have predisposed you to do this but if you look for ultimate conclusions you will be sorely disappointed. This dissertation is about breaking frames and reconstructing frames, in particular, breaking academic traditions that compel us to provide definitive answers at the “end” of a document such as this. In Frame 4 of Chapter 4 you will find made-up stories, personal ponderings, Greek mythology, quotes from a novel I’m reading at this time, academic text, art, religion, an Oscar Wilde witticism, unsolicited promotion of MacDonalds’ restaurants and nostalgia. There are no formulas, no six easy steps to art education success offered here. I only endeavor to share the philosophies and flavors of a so-called fourth frame: one that encompasses all of the frames but favors none in particular; one that encourages you to deconstruct then reconstruct your way of seeing. 169

The poetics of language and life, richly textured, blood-stained and piquant are celebrated here and not the pedantic, finger-pointing and point-scoring rhetoric of academic discourse. Please excuse my effrontery as I break now with academic protocol to address you personally. Don’t assume that everybody aspires to be part of your powerful group. Don’t expect that everybody wants to be in the center with you. They may actually be unconvinced by the concept of a center altogether. They may not want to be accepted if acceptance is predicated on your terms. They may not need you to validate their successes and contributions to society. They may not need your version of art museums. Frame 4 does not dismiss an academic contribution to cultural life but deliberately sets out to marginalize it by disrupting academic expectations and traditions. To date, academic discourse has been a prism in reverse, sucking in the colors of the culture and sending out one white light. The task is to reverse this process: to explore the spectrum of cultural perspectives; to interrogate the frames; and to continually acknowledge other frames. In terms of knowing the art museum, there is not one white light. In Frame 1 a pedagogical question might be posed in these terms: How has the artist used the technique of chiaroscuro to heighten the drama of the assembled men? In Frame 2, the question might be: Why do they only paint men in the moment of critical decision and action and women lying back passive, naked and sexually available? In Frame 3, the question might be: Are they some kind of gang or what? If you only look through one frame, ask one set of questions, you miss other vital ways of knowing. And each time you look through and/or acknowledge a different frame, you inevitably change 170

what and how you see through your own frame. This is at the heart of my vision for a new manifesto in art and museum education. These frames raise questions, not answer them. What are the possibilities exposed by the deconstruction and reconstruction of frames for art education both in art museum settings and in the classroom? How can a multiplicity of frames in art education help to reveal the paradox in our visual world? How can art education touch our humanity; making links to our human ancestors in more meaningful ways than learning about art periods and styles? What can it tell us about human hunger, passion, frustration, anger, courage and conscience? How can new views on art education spark and vitalize an ongoing struggle against social injustice and inequality? What part can it play in non-violent cultural debate? How can it proffer personal pleasures and pains? How does art education provide us with moral and ethical benchmarks? How can it engage us all in the production, distribution and uses of images in our society? These disjointed questions provide some sign posts for us, not in terms of the “academic perspective,” but in terms of making art educators reflect on their definitions of art and art museums in society. Like Cézanne at the turn of the last century who replaced the sentence, “This is what I see,” with the question, “Is this what I see?” (Hughes 1980, p. 18), we must make hesitation and uncertainty integral to a meaningful art education. We must look for new frames rather than accepting existing orthodoxies and only then will we experience the exhilaration of a road untaken; a world previously unconsidered. This chapter is about the struggle between the frames and keeping them resonant, vigourous and contentious. 171

Frame 1: The pedagogy of the bridge.

FRAME 1 HISTORICAL MEMORY

PEDAGOGY OF THE BRIDGE

Figure 12: The Pedagogy of Frame 1

On Philip Adam’s radio show, Late Night Live (Radio National, April 21, 1999), he discussed an article written by a woman journalist in Yugoslavia at the time of the Serbian-Kosovo conflict. The journalist was trying to come to terms with her different reactions to two press photographs. The first was an image of a woman whose throat had been cut. The second was of a bridge destroyed by NATO bombing. The journalist had remained dry eyed at the 172

sight of the woman but had openly sobbed when she viewed the destruction of the town’s bridge. Somehow, she reasoned, we don’t cry when we see the slain woman’s body because we accept our own mortality. The woman is one of us. We cry at the sight of the collapsed bridge because the bridge is supposed to be there when we have gone. It is a sign of our civilization; our collective humanity, creativity and ingenuity. The bridge is about making connections. The bridge is about all of us.

The art museum is like the bridge in the story. We may not use it but we would be devastated to lose it because it is supposed to be there when we are gone. It is supposed to mark our humanity, our creativity, and our ingenuity. It is our bridge to our forebears and our descendants. It is about all of us. So, if we accept this perception of an art museum as a bridge between the past and the future, then why has the teaching of art history focused so determinedly on the style of the artwork and not the content and humanity of the artwork? Susan Stewart (1995) concurs with the Yugoslavian journalist when she writes that our obsession in the art museum with history, is always an extension of our own personal obsession with death. Charles Wilson Peale advertised his museum in the Philadelphia Repository and Weekly Register as a “place where lost children could be kept until called for” (Stewart 1995, p. 47). Indeed, paintings represent people who seem to have cheated death through their glory and fame. Is this part of the reason why we sanctify art museums? If this is so, why do art educators assiduously avoid talking about life, death and mortality, instead choosing to teach about pointillism, brushstrokes, authenticity and the like. Are art museum educators frightened 173

of the task of discussing our sacred objects for what they might reveal? Have we lost the ability to talk about life and death? Mircea Eliade, in somewhat sexist language, claims that “profane man is the descendent of homo religiosus and he cannot wipe out his own history – that is the behavior of his religious ancestors which have made him what he is today” (1961, p. 209). Eliade also suggests that although many people today believe that they are “nonreligious,” they still retain “a large stock of

camouflaged myths and degenerated rituals” (1961, pp. 204-205). Some of the examples he offers include the battles with heroes and monsters in films; nudism and sexual freedom as a nostalgia for Eden; and New Year’s Eve parties which parallel ancient rituals of renewal. In short, Eliade is proposing that a lot of what we do, mostly without our conscious awareness, has a sacred dimension to it. The ritual of collecting and showing objects, of handing on objects down through generations, is part of life’s ancestral and religious practice. Stephen Bann (1995) in Shrines, Curiosities, and the Rhetoric of Display suggests the elaborate and costly arrangements of the relics of saints and other cultic objects for pilgrims, anticipated the cabinet of curiosities, as the cabinet of curiosities anticipated the modern art museum. If we draw the line back beyond this Medieval practice, examples of cave paintings and the adornment of objects marked the earliest manifestations of this human habit of collecting and displaying. The images and objects provide transcendent bridges; transits from the past generation to future generations. However, just as these different display regimes signaled a shift in the epistemic matrix, we are on the verge of a new epistemological era. The question for the art educator 174

becomes: what collecting and displaying form does the modern art museum anticipate in an era when souvenirs replace relics and televisual and virtual technologies morph and refigure the art museum as we know it? And moreso, how do we connect and teach about the human rituals of life and death as the sacred art museum turns up regularly on television and in our malls? Australian artist, Richard Goodwin, understands the notion of historical

memory as an important part of life. He chooses old clothing as the medium of his sculptures, often representing swathed new-borns and shrouded dead bodies. He finds the stain of humanity in the stitching, discolorations, name tags, patches and tears in the clothing. Goodwin exposes the human life cycle, unlike the blank, white canvas of the traditional Western artist, which hides the materialness of the painting and the mortality of its subjects. Christopher Allen writes of Goodwin’s work:

The drama is implicit in his use of cloth as a sculptural material, but Goodwin’s cloth is all, in reality, old clothing, and that gives it an additional charge of meaning. The transformation of adult clothing into the dressings of the new-born and of cadavers poignantly evokes mortality; for the historical and temporal marks inherent in or acquired by used clothing are not fully erased in their conversion, and just enough vestiges of memory remain to suggest its frailty. (1992, p.12)

Goodwin was commissioned to produce a public art work for the entrance of the Orange Regional Gallery in New South Wales. He called upon the Orange community to provide him with items of their clothing. Garments from many households in the rural city are memorialized as part of the steel and fabric sculpture. One wonders (and I have no answer here) when the 175

people of Orange visit the gallery which display has the most meaning for them – the socio-critical, feminist assemblage on postcolonialism or their old pair of jeans in the sculptured memorial? Proponents of Material Culture Studies have argued that a diverse range of images and objects should be included in art education (Bolin 1992, Chalmers 1978, Lanier 1984), specifically, more mundane and personal objects. Paul Bolin suggests that our cultural values and beliefs are inherent in these artifacts and that they should be studied alongside the great works of art. In the case of Orange Regional Gallery scenario, this would mean that you would study a pair of jeans with equal cultural curiosity to the Goodwin sculpture. What Bolin says is very valid but when we think of it in terms of the sacred dimension of the art museum, it becomes slightly problematic. Bolin writes:

The educational value of artifact study occurs when the object is examined as part of a dynamic inquiry process, in which questions are raised not only about the object, but also about those who make, use, respond to and preserve the artifact. An important part of the investigative process hinges upon reflecting not only about the object relative to the past, but considering its ongoing relationship with us today. (1992, p. 154)

Certainly, making a link between the past and the present in a cultural sense is meaningful. Although the lives of our ancestors were played out in different situations and technologies, their innate human endeavor remains familiar. I have explored aspects of this in my own teaching and agree that mundane objects can be sacred such as the plastic hospital bracelet of a first born child, but are not always sacred. 176

Bolin’s notion that objects are about “those who make, use, respond to and preserve” (Bolin 1992, p. 154) is interesting here. Throughout history many people have made and used objects. It is the art museum, though, in its many historical forms, that primarily has fulfilled the latter two functions. It is in these domains that choice of the sacred becomes apparent. The art museum is the institutional manifestation of the response to, and preservation of, the sacred and ritualized object. If we consider this in light of the Yugoslavian journalist’s tears shed over the demise of the bridge, then the art or museum object is different from the pair of jeans, the tennis ball or the stapler. We may learn about the cultural habits of people through these mundane objects but we throw them away with little or no sense of loss. The act of keeping, though, marks a spiritual event in the material world. It marks an eternal present. I wrote in Chapter One of Plato’s suspicion of art as an imitation of an imitation of the ideal; that is, the true God-inspired idea (of say, a chair) was copied in a material form (the constructed chair) and copied again in an aesthetic form (the painting of a chair). Moreover, Plato thought the arts metaphysically recreant and prone to error. However, he did not advocate the eradication of the arts from the education of Greek children. In fact, the opposite was true. He wrote in Republic III:

Let our artists be those who are gifted to discern the true nature of the beautiful and the graceful; then will our youth dwell in the land of health, amid fair sights and sounds, and receive the good in everything. (In Efland 1990, p. 15) 177

The paradox here suggests that although Plato obviously didn’t trust the arts, he still perceived of them in terms of offering “the good in everything,” and in an oblique reference to our mortality, that they secured “dwell[ing] in the land of health.” He was, reluctantly, still worshipful of the arts. For Plato, art images and objects were not the mundane objects of everyday life. He makes a distinction between what objects we need to survive and which objects need to survive. This thinking is not so distinct from modern day art education: suspicious of art on one level (its monetary value and a skepticism that the “priests” are trying to hoodwink us) but still believing that the arts somehow can provide spiritual harmony, emotional sustenance and immortality for people. The process of art education as a bridge focuses on human connection and religious transcendence. Humankind, in our ongoing struggle for supremacy over nature, has searched for foolproof answers to life and for defeating death. To do so, we have created a lineage of both secular and religious “gods” to worship and to look to for answers. Some of these “gods” have been divine, others scientific or aesthetic. Our need to believe in our triumph over nature has seen the creation of likenesses in paint and stone; the quest for holy grails; and the erection of monumental constructions. However, on an almost daily basis, we are confronted with evidence that we have not defeated nature as floods, fires and disease turn flesh into dust. Only through contemplating death can we excel in the art of living. Art education provides the richly textured environment with which to imagine the unimaginable happening. It can address the “euphoric security” (Barthes 1984, p. 70) 178

promoted by the sacred image/object and the myths they sustain in humankind. Moreover, in this frame, the art museum unashamedly offers master narratives and cultural benchmarks. It accepts the authority vested in it by society. In its very nature of collecting and displaying, the art museum cannot avoid taking a political stance. New Museologists such as Hooper Greenhill (1992), Bennett (1986 a&b, 1990, 1997) and Crimp (1993) demonize the art museum for this political stance. Moore (1997) suggests that the museum should adopt the pedagogical strategies of the theme park where pleasure and entertainment are paramount. However, these academic discourses fail to understand the notion of museum as bridge. They fail to comprehend that museums are made by people for people and for sacred purposes. Art museums do provide ethical and moral pedagogies handed down from our forebears and assessed and rescripted in the present. Rather than viewing the art museum as an instrument of institutional oppression, it is far more beneficial to view it in terms of reproducing the fundamental practices, conflicts and rituals of the society in which it exists. Art museum education in Frame 1 is about similarity and not difference. What do humans share as well as common DNA. It addresses our sexuality, desire, hope, fraternity, fear, anger, despair and our contrary violent and benevolent behaviors. Our imagination is fired by the possibility of conversing with the past; of finding answers to life’s successes and miseries. The art museum provides a space to converse with the past. In the academic discourses, the art museum has been demonized for its elitist pedagogy: elitist in terms of delineating differences and excluding 179

people based on such social markers as gender, race and class. Elitism, though, can be inclusive because of its aspirational and inspirational role. It can be about striving to achieve. The pedagogy of the art museum can be one of human potential not division. The makers of the Rocky movies understood this when Rocky Balboa ran up the steps of the Philadelphia Art Museum. He was at one with the city and humanity when he watched the sun rise over a glistening cityscape; the sacred treasure house in his frame. So

too, did the makers of Born Yesterday and L.A. Story perceive of the aspirational potential of the art museum. Rocky, Billie Dawn and Harris Telemacher all impelled their lives to higher achievement in association with the art museum.

As Flora Kaplan writes:

Museums appear to be unique public institutions that have emerged in western nation-states of democratic bent. They are spaces in which elites and competing social groups express their ideas and world views. Unlike palaces, churches, temples and noble residences, there is no hereditary or ordained monopoly of access, possession and display of symbols of power. On the contrary, museums accommodate diverse contents and ideas. And access is tolerated, and even encouraged, among a large and differentiated population, making accumulated knowledge widely available. (1994, p. 2-3)

Right of passage to the art museum is not about being born into the fold or having money. In the late twentieth century, anyone can attend the art museum or, as has been addressed in this dissertation, can access its pedagogy through the means of popular culture. Art museums, and the new virtual, 180

video, print and filmic versions, are just incidences in a long history of people making connections. Art museums as bridges are about human pride, nostalgia and historical memory: the images and objects that our forebears chose because they thought they were important enough to preserve for future generations. They are about the thousands of hours of labor people willingly gave to making images and objects as keepsakes for unknown viewers. They are

about offering cautionary tales and warnings like a parent alerting a child. They are likewise, about bragging and saying, “look what we as a culture achieved with our time on Earth.” They are about poignant nostalgia for happier times. Foremost, though, they provide sacred metaphors transmitting values, ethics and belief systems to those who come after.

This frame, however, is but one frame or way of knowing the art museum. To experience the art museum in these terms only, is to be blinded to other cultural imperatives and interpretations. This way of knowing is arrogant, self-congratulatory and charged with the romantic mythologies of King Arthur, Don Quixote and the Kennedys. It is also primal, spiritual and anthropological. This frame overlaps with, and seeps into, the other frames but is likewise, irrelevant to the other frames. 181

Frame 2: The pedagogy of contention.

FRAME 2 CRITICAL RESISTANCE

PEDAGOGY OF CONTENTION

Figure 13: The Pedagogy of Frame 2

In 1789, a gathering of anarchists expressed their beliefs in liberty, equality and fraternity and vowed not to disband until they had succeeded in overthrowing a corrupt and excessive monarchy. The modern art museum came into being, not just in tandem with the guillotine, but alongside spirited calls for a fair and equitable democracy. The French Revolution, bloody and violent as it may have been, heralded an art museum that was open to all. 182

Even if the exhibitions were the spoils of war and terror, the general public were given free and unrestricted access to the sacred treasures of the culture. Frame 2 acknowledges and encourages the fundamental connection between art museums and revolution. It supports a pedagogy which promotes a belief in non-violent, cultural exchange: a candid forum to criticize, to argue, to question and to stand up against injustice. Throughout this dissertation, Frame 2 has been analogous with academic

discourse and much of that academic discourse has been involved in calls for social and political change. In human history many revolutionary thinkers have outlined manifestos for change; none more important to the twentieth century than Karl Marx. I say this because although his economic theories and political philosophies have been largely discredited (as recent events in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union would suggest) his work still informs the thinking of a large number of cultural critics. Marxist theory positioned the proletarian class as the subject of history; and the capitalist means of production as the object of revolutionary struggle. The workers, responsible for producing the world, were called upon to seize the means of production in the name of a new collectivity. However, most Marxists today no longer subscribe to the violent overthrow of the political systems in their countries. They do however, see a need to oppose the ills of bourgeois capitalist societies. This sense of revolution, though, is changing as our technologies refigure and redefine us. The bourgeoisie and the proletariat become less definitive as they both engage, in equal parts, with such mass experiences as film, television and the internet. In Reading Television John Fiske and John Hartley suggest that television (and I add all forms of popular culture here) 183

starts to reframe our notion of class and class division. The distinction between class in itself and class for itself is an important one. They write:

Class in itself involves the objective existence of classes produced by a social structure deriving ultimately from what Marx variously terms the material, social or economic “conditions of existence.” These classes are differentiated from one another by inequalities of power, wealth, security, opportunity and position . . . But people’s response to their objective class situation gives rise to the secondary notion of class for itself. This is the (sometimes only potential) awareness among people of a common identity springing from a common experience. (1987, pp. 101-102)

Certainly, class is problematic in the spaces of mass media. Just about everybody interacts with popular cultural forms. Some people own the means of production and others don’t, but socio-economic status is not the sole determinant of people’s consumption of cultural goods and services. There are many people who are richer than my family but who don’t engage with public television and the arts. Likewise, education is no longer a useful marker of class. I may be writing a Ph.D. dissertation, a sign of high levels of education, but I still engage the “low” artform of soap opera every day by viewing Days of Our Lives. In the national and international networking of television, different demographics do determine how television is consumed but these aren’t determined on the basis of Marxist class. More recently, the revolutionary struggle has been framed around social as opposed to economic difference. New forces have emerged to engage in cultural restructure. Feminists, lesbians and gays, people of color, environmental groups, people with disabilities and other “minority” groups have made gender, racial, religious, physical and sexual difference the site of 184

struggle. I cannot dispute the fact that these are important social issues nor that many positive social changes have emanated from these challenges to the status quo. However, I have become somewhat cynical of the process when academics and visual artists use these marginal sites of contention to illuminate social inequalities whilst concurrently ensuring their own positions as institutional experts. So many interests are now seen to be “marginalized” that it almost mainstream to be seen in this light.

Revolutionary debate has been trapped between the static binaries of political correctness and political incorrectness. I wrote in Chapter 1 of Henry Giroux’s pedagogical conception of “border crossing,” the act of challenging existing disciplinary knowledge and the institutions that frame those discourses. I suggested his description of border crossers “moving in and out of borders constructed around coordinates of difference and power” (1992, p. 29) evoked suitably spirited risk-takers and mavericks but an equally rigid continuance of us and them divisions. The “people” wearing white hats in midday showdowns with the black-hatted patriarchy, so to speak. I think the notion of border crossing is, in essence, a useful one. However, there are less adversarial ways of constructing the idea of border crossing. Border crossing in this new frame is viewed in terms of a fast bleeding of color into the fabric of an endless white cloth as opposed to line-drawn-in-the-sand scenarios. This frame acknowledges that the oppressive Man, demonized in academic frames variably as bourgeois capitalist, school administrator, art museum director or hegemonic overlord is also husband, brother, hiker, diner, mechanic, lover, mourner and television viewer. 185

We are all members of marginalized groups in some way or other. There is no quintessential white, anglo-saxon, homophobic, racist, environment- destroying, powerbroking male to rally against. If there was, he’d have been shot a long time ago. And if we did shoot him, he would be sadly missed by his father, bowling club teammates, local brothels and his dog. Individuals today are conglomerates of very contradictory elements and subject positions. Indeed, if we turn multiple frames on social issues, we can be very confused and torn between such things as feeding hungry families and logging rain forests and appreciating the technical skills of the Old Masters or disregarding them for their inherent patriarchal privilege. The point to make though, is that by engaging multiple frames on any issue, we cannot help but be drawn into debate. So, how can art museum education benefit from this idea that life is not divided between oppressive people and oppressed people; good art and bad art; the politically correct and incorrect? How can the metaphor of color bleeding through an infinite white cloth have practical ramifications for art educators? How can this lead to a contentious culture yet a tolerant society? Firstly, the stain on the white cloth allows us to conceive of people immersed in the Western visual culture and on reasonably equal yet contrary terms. A hundred years ago, predominantly only wealthy families had access to the art images of the world and art was perceived of in terms of being over there, housed in art museums and big, expensive mansions. Today, most people in first world countries have access to the same repertoire of images. The President’s daughter probably sees much the same imagery in her day as does the daughter of an unemployed, single mother in Australia. They watch 186

Friends on television; pass a Calvin Klein billboard on the way to school; have a silverchair sticker on their notepad and a Monet poster in their dormitory. The dominant economic system is always going to favor those who have money and it is always going to determine what images are available, but how we know images has changed. Images have become invitations to participate in the economic system. The President’s daughter may be able to buy more Calvin Klein pairs of jeans and go to more silverchair concerts but these possibilities are still open to the Australian daughter of the unemployed, single mother. If we can perceive of ourselves in these unique but strangely similar terms, and not in us and them terms, then no one view becomes superior to any other view about these images. If you feel as if you are an integral part of the visual culture; that you can participate in, and contribute to the culture at large, then you can openly question and contest that which is before you without fear. Art museum education has traditionally been about making some images special. It has the potential though, to now make us see images as relatively equal in value. I’m not saying that anything goes here, but that we need to bring a critical interrogation to all images. We should try to avoid the imposition of absolute standards of value or worth whether these standards are determined by a high culture aesthetic or a particular brand of negatively, pre-judged pedagogy. Secondly, it creates unique opportunities for situating pedagogy amidst new binaries. Line-in-the-sand politically correct and incorrect positions become reframed in the more process-oriented terms of dynamism and stasis. 187

Ferdinand de Saussure (1966) used the terms synchronic and diachronic to look at language in flux: language ebbing and flowing over time as opposed to dead languages such as Latin. I think that he provides excellent terms of reference for art educators. They can now canvass looking at things in process as opposed to looking at things in a fixed moment. In more specific terms, I mean looking at art in life as opposed to art abstracted from life. Let me draw an analogy here. Scientists in the nineteenth century explored nature by

capturing it and identifying it. A common example is that of the butterfly which was killed, stretched out, pinned on a board and ceremonially labeled. The butterfly was effectively frozen in time. In the real world, things don’t have to be labeled. Their identity comes from their niche in the ecology. In the dynamic state, identity or being is the discourse. When things become abstracted from the real world, you have to write about them otherwise they don’t make sense. A metadiscourse is necessary to locate them or imagine how they might have been. Art functions in much the same way. When art is abstracted from life into the museum, it becomes frozen in time. The only way to make sense of it, is for someone to write about it so you can imagine how that life might have been. Academic art discourses are a part of that scientific paradigm. If we can shift the frame so that art is seen as making and viewing in life versus art as something fixed and labeled, then we overcome the need for intermediaries. Discussions on art become discussions on life. The “priests” are gone and we no longer need someone to interpret for us. In this state of the ever-staining cloth, we are the “experts” because we are a part of that fabric of life, and as 188

“experts” we are free to argue and shape the cultural debate. This is the bloodless coup of the new millennium. Of course, this does not suggest that the way we know the art in life will not invite conflict. It will. It has to, because we come to images and objects from different life perspectives. Politics explicitly enters the picture. For example, the Nazi displays of idealized human bodies at the 1936 Berlin Olympics can be juxtaposed against the ideal forms explored in Greek and

Roman sculpture and our current day obsession with Pamela Anderson’s breast enhancement procedures through television. All of these scenarios evoke a sense of racial purity and perfection and through contrary frames can be both deified or demonized. All of these visual moments are associated with acts of human mutilation through wars and/or surgeries. In this frame of contention, who should we worship? When we distill these images and objects in the crucible of the art museum, the essential pedagogy is about the human body and sameness. The paradox is revealed when we can look at these images and objects through multiple frames; one of which turns a frame on our own bodies. The obsessive lengths Western peoples will go to have “perfect” bodies, (riding bikes that go nowhere; acid put on our faces to peel away the skin; sacks of silicone surgically implanted in breasts, calves and penises; fat sucked out of our bodies with garden hoses; hair tufts plaited and plugged into our scalps, human growth hormone injections and steroids and so on) is hidden when we teach about, and rigidly frame, the practices of another culture discreet from our own. A woman in Africa with a hundred bands around her elongated neck no longer seems a victim or insane when compared to 189

barbaric Western forms of lyposuction. Ancient Greek soldiers and athletes were not always noble in practice. German athletes were not necessarily responsible for the evils of Nazi dogma. In Frame 2, the body is contentious at every viewing. I wrote in Chapter 1 that I see more value in defining the art museum from a Gramscian perspective where the relationship between the institution and the people is characterized as a pedagogic one and one that has the potential for change. People are born into an environment saturated with particular conceptual structures peculiar to place and time. They become enculturated by engaging the available symbolic systems to negotiate a way of living there. In simple terms, people are able to act upon and think about themselves and their environment according to the categories of thought and action that are culturally available. But these categories are not rigid structures determining a one-way path for the human subject. They are dialectical and dynamic relations between cultures and human agents. Passive subject becomes active agent, or at least partially so. By acting on and thinking about their living environment people change it and the ways they relate to it and so gradually shift the cultural rules of what is possible and what is not. By engaging the symbolic systems across time they reconstitute the cultural patterns as those patterns reconstitute them as agents. The process of negotiating with all that has gone before comes to include that set of negotiations which adds to, and so changes, the nature of all that has gone before and all that will follow. And so on. If art museum education is to be truly revolutionary it must embrace the dynamism of life and not reduce art to a static state that is in need of 190

interpretation. The recent academization of the art museum, in the name of democracy and social change, has in fact created a sense of stagnancy and a set of new “priests” to maintain the status quo. It has perpetrated us-and-them rhetoric to keep the “priests” in power. This research has fostered doubt about the survival and relevance of the art museum but has given us nothing but theme parks to replace their revolutionary potential. No wonder the real revolution is taking place beyond its walls in the fabric of popular

culture. No wonder the art museum, one of the symbols of revolution, has moved to the realms of the everyday people. If Frame 1 is about human pride, then Frame 2 is about human shame. Frame 2 in the new manifesto of art education is about human conscience and our need to speak out when we see something is wrong: from the bully in the playground, to our secret infidelities, to a corrupt political regime. If we can experience shame at our personal and collective wrongs then a cultural ripple will effect social change. Art education should jump-start our courage. It should inspire us to flow beyond, not wallow in the marinade of art history. It should open debate on both the noble and contemptible spirit of humankind as represented in our images and objects. Contention in this fabric of life is about struggle, controversy, discord and strife. The art educator provides the environment for argument and dispute. The communist endeavor in Eastern Europe was not the social Utopia that Marx envisioned. Nor has the postmodern revolution framed around social as opposed to economic difference delivered a more equitable state. What matters though, is the fertile space these cultural writings provide for human deliberation and struggle in making the conditions of existence more 191

equal and fair. Are the silent rumblings of new revolutions now emanating from the televisual and virtual spaces of popular culture? Billie Dawn’s social catharcism on viewing the Van Gogh painting in the filmic art museum seemed contrived in Born Yesterday. However, the painting drove both plot and discord on the nature of “happy families.” Such controversies between art and life are the site for art education in the new manifesto.

This frame, though, is but one frame or way of knowing the art museum. To experience the art museum in these terms only, is to be blinded to other cultural imperatives and interpretations. This way of knowing is naive, foolishly optimistic, angry and charged with the revolutionary mythologies of Joan of Arc, Che Chevara and Martin Luther King. It is also emotional, psychological and intellectual. This frame overlaps with, and seeps into, the other frames but is likewise, irrelevant to the other frames. 192

Frame 3 : The pedagogy of relish.

FRAME 3 POPULAR CULTURE

PEDAGOGY OF RELISH

Figure 14: The Pedagogy of Frame 3

All members of society engage, to some degree, in popular, mass cultural experience. Different life experiences, though, lead to different kinds of negotiation with mass media. For example, there is an infinite number of responses to a MacDonald’s Family Restaurant, as there is to an art museum. To some people, MacDonalds is noisy and offers fatty, tasteless foods and the art museum is regarded as a place of contemplation and nourishment. To 193 others, the art museum may be dull and boring but MacDonalds means a real treat and family time. To the more obsessive, both MacDonalds and art museums might mean clean toilet facilities with soap. To someone who has seen the MacDonalds restaurant in a refurbished castle in Europe, the shop front ambiance of the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York may seem very uninspiring. Art educators need to view students as agents who construct meaning from a myriad of stories, images and objects that envelop their daily experiences. Prior to the technological revolution, the family and the Church provided the information by which we developed our personal identities: the range of our experiences was framed by them. Now, we are literally surrounded by information and the complex interplay that ensues, both consciously and subconsciously, when we negotiate this visual communication system, makes us who we are. In the increasing heterogeneity of contemporary life, there is far greater potential for people to know different things and to know those different things differently, than ever before. This depends not only on actual experience but on mass-mediated and virtual experiences, as well. Paul Duncum (1997) agrees, suggesting in Art Education for New Times that just as today’s society is made up of fragmented parts, the individual is seen as multi-faceted too, that is, positioned across a variety of identities. Indeed, this is an important consideration if we are to acknowledge the number of potential frames each person uses daily to negotiate their world. For example, a farmer’s wife in pre-industrialized, rural England would have had a fairly straightforward and predictable role in life. A farmer’s wife today might manage the farm; be a mother; work two days a week at the local 194

doctor’s surgery; serve on a committee; belong to a non-mainstream religious group; read murder mysteries; be a vegetarian; and surf the internet in her spare time. Each of these roles contributes to the construction of an individual identity that is rarely duplicated. However, alongside this shift to multi-faceted personhood, there is also a strange phenomenon occurring. A common, visual, slide-bank is being stored in our minds due to the increasingly universal imagery we see in our day. I recently showed a group of my university students an advertisement for a brand of vodka. I moved about the projected image pointing at certain parts and the students responded by naming the fingered items: a bar, shag pile carpet, 70s wallpaper, a man, a woman and so on. When I pointed to a scene within the vodka bottle, the students without missing a beat answered, “Africa.” I asked how many of the students had been to Africa. None of them had ever been there. I asked, “well, how do you know that what we are looking at is Africa?” Their forthright answer was, “we just know it is.” I too, knew it was Africa, and like the students, I have never been to that continent. No-one even questioned the fact that the African landscape was in a bottle. The visually-based knowledge that we now carry around in our heads is very distinct from past societies. We know, in any given day, more about people who live on the other side of the world then we do about our next door neighbors. I know that Hillary Clinton wore a pink dress today and yet I don’t know whether my neighbors, Jenny and Mike Dyer, are at home or away. My parents know what falling snow looks like and yet they have never seen it fall from the sky. 195

What role do art educators have to play in this new visual world. Duncum argues that:

. . . it is crucial for art education to acknowledge that while visual communication survives, it has changed form. Imagery is now infinitely more plentiful, pervasive, immediate, and ephemeral than ever before. And proponents of the information highway promise a high level of interactivity. (1997, p. 73)

Visual culture is no longer just paintings. We now live in visual culture and yet art educators have, by and large, been slow to acknowledge this monumental paradigm shift from print to image. At the turn of the last century, there were very few visual images in the day to day lives of most people. There would have been some paintings, a few precious photographs, an occasional image on shop windows or signs, packaging on goods, postage stamps and a limited number of illustrations in newspapers, books and magazines. At the turn of the last century, it was appropriate to teach people about paintings and to draw because that is what their lives entailed. As we are on the verge of a new century, it seems almost inconceivable that we still teach visual art in much the same way. In the manifesto of the multiple frames, it is important that we discern the physical, identity and cognitive changes of our society. If Frame 1 is about human pride and Frame 2 about human shame, then Frame 3 is about human sensation. Our interaction with the world is increasingly based on a flood of aural and visual experience. Our art has moved from Cézanne to Gilbert and George in the blink of a hundred years. The nature of mass imagery fascinates the population as two (or more) television families, Imax cinemaplexes, internet and theme cafes and 196

inescapable giant billboard images are commonplace adjuncts to Western life. Here the idea of high art simply evaporates in the sensuous fantasy worlds of immense wealth, victory in battle and endless orgasm. Popular culture is open wide to imbecile and professor alike, and all the people who fill the spectrum in between. The giganticism of the visual experience, its power as spectacle, must factor into any discussion on the pedagogy of art and art museums.

I now want to introduce the key word of this frame and that is “relish.” Relish seems somehow the appropriate word to encapsulate our collective fascination and intrigue with the image. My computer thesaurus provides all kinds of tantalizing interpretations of the word.

appreciation (noun) predilection partiality liking inclination bent preference enjoyment

condiment (noun) seasoning flavoring appetizer

taste (noun) flavor savor tang

enjoy (verb) like appreciate prefer 197

I had originally chosen the word “pleasure” to key this frame. It is a word often used in academic discourses in conjunction with popular culture. Somehow, though, when I tried to fit the descriptor to a range of frames it seemed very one dimensional, for pleasure is never truly understood without an accompanying comprehension of pain. For some there is pleasure in love and pain in violence. For others, there is pleasure in violence and much pain in being in love. How do we determine the correct

response? For this reason, the word “relish” seems more vivid to describe how we come to dwell intensely upon something. Relish is hot and spicy. It can be delicious or it can burn. Relish describes the heightened viewing of some horror on the news after we have been warned that the following scenes may offend. Relish involves craving something that is not ours. Relish is the best sexual experience we ever had. Relish is described as liking but also in terms of having a “bent,” or slightly twisted engagement with the world. Academic discourse is bedded down in rational, linear, logical positivism. The author takes on an objective, disinterested perspective. Life roles, though, are not taken on from such an objective, disinterested position. They are subjective, inquisitive, experiential, sometimes illogical, bent and full of relish. Is it any wonder then that debate about the interface of visual images and people has been most vociferously engaged from within the domain of Frame 3 and not Frames 1 and 2. Whilst academic discourses address the starving and poor, it is done from a clinical distance. Sexuality is discussed under the scientific paradigm of biology and the image system is presented to us, labeled and ordered. Lamentably, it seems as if experiences of social 198 tragedy and not current art academic research are responsible for bringing the debate on people and images into the public arena. The 1999 schoolyard massacre of twelve students and a teacher in a Colorado school sharply focused the interconnection between human action and visual imagery for communities who tried to unravel the enormity of what had happened in their midst. These communities were by no means confined to the United States either, as the live broadcasts were played out simultaneously around the world. Psychological, religious, political and pedagogical experts all grappled to find expedient links between violent teenagers on a killing rampage and a population desensitized to violent acts through the process of viewing. Even a glossy, inner city magazine in Brisbane, Australia addressed the events amidst cafe society, fashion, travel talk and property values. Armed with the obligatory set of statistics and titled, Up in Arms, Dr. John Irvine wrote, “ . . . researchers claim that, on average, children will witness 8,000 television murders by the time they leave primary school” (1999, p. 21). However, what purpose do these statistics really play? Since the earliest manifestations of humanity, people have used their mobile and dexterous fingers both to be violent and to record acts of violence. Cave paintings dealt predominantly with acts of hunting and killing. The violence of human upon fellow human is inherent in crucifixion imagery exhibited throughout Christendom these past two thousand years. Scenes of rape, murder and pillage have adorned everything from Greek pottery to Renaissance ceilings to Indian temples. In the American Civil War, photographers set up make- shift studios with the troops to record the horrendous carnage. Art museums 199 are full of the bounty collected during wars, invasions and public executions. Eight thousand murders are ostensibly nothing new to those who lived through the First and Second World Wars. Throughout history, images have depicted violence but they have predominantly followed the act of violence, not caused it. Paintings of the Battle of Waterloo or television footage from the Vietnam War were not conceived until real shots were fired and soldiers fell. Traditionally we have recorded the violent moment to make some sense of it; either to boast about it and claim victory, or to recoil at its horror and to make certain it never happens again. Twentieth century popular imagery offers us nothing new in representing barbarous acts. It merely follows a long tradition. However, in the these shifting spaces saturated in images, art educators should be at the forefront of research that investigates the relationship between images and people. Do young people look at a violent scene with the same astigmatic familiarity as when my students responded “Africa” to the vodka advertisement? Art educators should also be developing pedagogical strategies for using potent imagery such as the scenes beamed around the world from Colorado that day. One such strategy involves turning alternative frames on current events which disturb consciousness. We all know violence but it is how we come to frame violence that is important. The media tends to focus on certain aspects of any event and neglects other aspects. In this way, they set the agenda and frame the social and political debate. It is not so much that they tell people what to think, just that they determine what people should be thinking about. The art educator has a substantial role to play in mediating and 200

translating this visual material. They can provide the conduit for meaningful and less hysterical examinations of people and violence by drawing our attention to all visual matter that surrounds an event. For example, much media time was devoted to connecting the viewing habits of the gunmen to their actions. One scene from the film, Basketball Diaries, was singled out in particular. It featured a gun-toting Leonardo di Caprio in a long, black trenchcoat: the imprimatur of the young Colorado gunmen. The film was promptly banned. Such knee-jerk reactions close down discussion on imagery: the problem now being solved, so to speak. The problem of violence in society is never this simplistic nor monodimensional. Other visual images marked this event but were largely overlooked. Little mention was made of the endless visual tributes produced by non-violent students in honor of the victims: cars were decorated; crosses laid out, photographs assembled etc. These images were about grieving, healing and human compassion. The pedagogy of shifting frames provides an important contribution to how an event such as this is viewed. We were only presented with the frame of a dangerous and out of control society and an escalating sense of fear and terror in our communities. The frame of the honorable acts performed by the majority remained concealed. Moreover, the art educator can engage in the pedagogy of paradox. Paradox is always inherent in human endeavor. As the world was horrified by the images of the slain teenagers in the Colorado school; NATO troops, framed as heroes, bombed over two thousand sites in Yugoslavia in the same month. So too, history’s wars, assassinations and executions are carefully recorded in paint to be honored in the art museum. Art history is our 201 connection to past generations. It records human striving for understanding life and death. It provides a moral and ethical voice handed down from our forebears. Thou shalt no kill unless, of course, you have the social and political power to do it in the name of the collective good! The role of the art educator is to sift our visual culture for the inconsistencies; to open debate. If we can bridge the past to the present, to make sense of what is happening in the now, we can observe how images are a part of human conflict as well as human reconciliation. To date it is a fair criticism to level at art educators that, like the media, they have been guilty of “controlling the gates” on imagery. They have determined through curation and the curriculum what images should be seen and what images should be neglected. They have arbitrarily decided what images are important and therefore what images the public not only wants to see but needs to see. However, the art educator who continues to offer only art historical and academic frames on the world will miss the opportunity to relish our visual culture; to partake of its sensuous flavors and to engage in its life forces. The notion of “right” images and “wrong” images disintegrates into a infinite spectrum of imagery. Some images horrify; others make us cry; and others inspire our humanity. The art educator must accept that they have no right to be gatekeepers on our visual world. Instead, they should perceive of themselves as cultural brokers – constantly re- negotiating our visual currency. Art educators must become curious about their world and they must bring their expertise in images of the past to make useful connections between the past and images present and future. Incorporating everyday images and 202

objects into the realm of art education should not take the form of adding it onto the existing framework. It should be an integral part of the pedagogy. The multi-faceted individual with their vast and similar visual storehouse understands that the image and subsequently life, has changed. They construct meaning from a myriad of stories, images and objects that envelop their daily experiences. They understand that they live in a visual culture. They also comprehend that there is more than one reality. To loosely paraphrase Douglas Adams, if art educators don’t listen to the dolphins (those beyond the academic tower); it will be at their peril. They will face extinction and irrelevance.

This frame, however, is but one frame or way of knowing the art museum. To experience the art museum in these terms only, is to be blinded to other cultural imperatives and interpretations. This way of knowing is voyeuristic, self-interested, phantasmic and charged with the popular mythologies of Marilyn Monroe, Jesse James and Princess Diana. It is also violent, sexual and tangled with dreams. This frame overlaps with, and seeps into, the other frames but is likewise, irrelevant to the other frames. 203

Frame 4: pedagogy of paradox.

FRAME 4

FRAMES WITHIN FRAMES

THE PARADOX

Figure 15: The Pedagogy of Frame 4

In Frame 4, the myth that democracy is made up of men of reason is brought to task as angry boys, single teenage mothers, ambitious politicians, neo-Nazis, disabled athletes, farmer’s wives and centenarians all contest their place in the Western world. Power is played out over the sacred sites and the art museum is one of those sites. I stated in Frame 2 that democracy is contentious and rightly so, for one voice and one world view returns to the notion of a Tower of Babel; a central 204

viewpoint promoted through a universal discourse. Current academic discourse that holds the art museum fixed in the spotlight would have us believe in its centrality. If we stop looking at the highlighted object and turn our attention to the source of the light, new frames become evident. It is indeed a very big and potent light; bigger by numbers and therefore more democratic. That light falls upon a man with a flickering candle sitting in the middle of a large auditorium. If we listen carefully we can hear the man

propound: “I’m the center of the universe.” Culture should not be defined by the values of a minority of the population. In this case, I refer to the palliative utterances of the academic discourse which positions the art museum in the center of the frame. There is no single pedagogy nor one, pure and objective discourse of the art museum unless we continue to illuminate and make central, the man and his candle. We’ve had all of these implicit assumptions about the pedagogy of the art museum and the universality of the discourse but now it is time to look at those assumptions. For example, if there is a dominating alternative language about the art museum that marginalizes the academic discourse, how do we feel about it and what do we do about it? The pedagogy of the art museum as authored by people other than academics (in the babelled realms of popular culture) is not central. It is, however, intuitively sacred. It has the potential to be all of the frames. The people who are immersed in the Frame 3 environment don’t need to be educated in the traditional pedagogy of the art museum in order to have power and open access to it. They have created their own version of it in the spaces of popular culture. Instead, it is the academics who need to be educated in these alternative pedagogies which 205

strip them of their intermediary powers and suggest that there are more immediate ways of knowing the sacred site. The academic discourse only ever speaks from one frame yet expresses qualities of the other frames through a false consciousness of the image that has no basis in reality. It reifies the potency of paintings and museums through a kind of linguistic imperialism. Wrapped in an academic cloak of quasi-kindred spirithood and rhetoric, the discourse maintains its superiority by perpetuating itself within the realm of academics. We keep assuming that we have created this definitive lexicon, accessible to everyone like Esperanto, but perhaps it is just another marginalized set of vocabulary. Meike Bal writes:

Academic humanist discourse is . . . involved in making such expository gestures about, as well as by means of, visual objects or their analogues, “facts.” The argument stands or falls with the adherence given to the gesture of “that’s how it is.” (1996, p. 6)

When we can strip the academic discourse of its centrality and power to confer “fact” status upon itself, then new pedagogical terrains emerge. We have come to assume that academics (the empowered) liberate and empower the marginalized. With a benevolent paternalism, academics tell the children about themselves in order to set them free. The assumption in art education is that the “priests” on high will bestow this sacred art language from above to classroom teachers, museum educators and students down below. The art museum is sacred but on their terms not on ours. The point is not to make the academic discourse obsolete for it does play a part in the 206

wider cultural debate on art and museums. Rather, it is to reverence it as but one marginalized voice. Frame 4 is not a content based frame. It is not prescriptive of content, however, it is generative of content because it is a process based frame. Frame 4 looks at what has been previously marginalized or invisible within academic discourse and reveals the paradox. It has to do with people’s humanity and not the cardboard cut-outs of correctness. It looks not only at what is in the frames but who is looking through the frames and the conflicts within and between those people. What I propose here is nothing new, for we are continually bumping up against the romantic, the critical and the sensate in life and having to reconcile, juggle and balance these multiple frames. It is just time for art education pedagogues to acknowledge and reflect these life patterns. Curriculum documents and museum education programs, written exclusively in Frame 2 terms, are not mimetic of life. Author, Bernard Schlink writes poignantly of the dynamic state of the human entity as they engage with a range of paradoxical frames. In his novel, The Reader, he offers a compelling account of the connections between Germany’s past and present. Born in 1944 under the dark shadow of the Holocaust, he addresses the moral and philosophical difficulties associated with reconciling our love for someone and our abhorrence at the acts they may have committed. The book’s narrator has to contend with conflicting frames as he falls in love with a woman/guard who tends him when he falls ill but who has also condemned people to the Nazi death chambers in the past. How can we love someone who has committed acts of atrocity? How do we find equilibrium amidst feelings of concurrent lust and guilt? What does 207 it cost you when you move between the frames? This is not an intellectual exercise, but one that plays out in the human heart and conscience. Schlink writes:

I envied other students back then who had dissociated themselves from their parents and thus from the entire generation of perpetrators, voyeurs, and the wilfully blind, accommodators and accepters, thereby overcoming perhaps not their shame, but at least their suffering because of the shame. But what gave rise to the swaggering self-righteousness I so often encountered among these students? How could one feel guilt and shame, and at the same time parade one’s self-righteousness? (1997, p. 167)

Pride, shame and sensation are all integral elements in Schlink’s eternal paradox. So too, do we reconcile the frames of our art history and accept the inherent ambiguity and imperfection. We honor as masterpiece the sculptured figures of The Rape of the Sabine Women (1583) by Giovanni Bologna and the blind and mute sexuality of the genitally-featured woman in Rene Magritte’s painting, The Rape (1934). Does this then mean that we condone the rape of women? Is the art museum responsible for women being raped? It is hard not to exaggerate the importance of this mythology of sexual hostility but do paintings evoke acts of sexual aggression against women or merely reflect a violent and paradoxical society? The art educator must continue to shift the frame and not simply be parasitic of someone’s else thoughts. We cannot view the sea of images and objects in our lives just in terms of the intellectual frame, nor, for that matter, only from the sensate frame – a beast without heart or mind. This is a process of negotiation; an ongoing and infinite process. 208

Schlink recalls the story of Odysseus when he writes of history having a purpose, “but the goal it finally attains, after countless disruptions, confusions and delusions, is the beginning, its own original point, which once reached must be set off from again” (1997, p. 179). He goes on to describe the homecoming of Homer’s hero in these terms:

The Odyssey is not the story of homecoming. How could the Greeks, who knew that one never enters the same river twice, believe in homecoming? Odysseus does not return home to stay, but to set off again. The Odyssey is the story of motion both purposeful and purposeless, successful and futile. What else is the history of law. (1997, p. 179-180)

The long, adventurous journey of Odysseus (Ulysses) returning to Ithaca from the siege of Troy is an ancient metaphor for life. Odysseus’ journey blurs the frames of mortals and immortals and life and death. His homecoming does not resolve in stasis but begins again a dynamic and sometimes fruitful, sometimes futile, engagement with life. The human odyssey is a journey of pride, shame and sensation in a metamorphic and cyclic rhythm. There is no finite body of knowledge described in an art curriculum or curated in museums that one can learn by rote and recite. There is just the formidable capacity to emphasize the aesthetic, moral and human qualities of life despite agonizing setbacks and retreats and new generations being swept into the cycle. Pedagogy in Frame 4 is about translation and mediation across the frames. If we truly scrutinize current art education practice at the level of the everyday, the academic discourse is chronically bastardized. In reality, there is no such thing as a pure Frame 2 academic discourse when it comes to floor 209

talks in museums or art classroom practice. Art educators don’t look at these changes to the academic discourse as a corruption. They already translate and mediate across the thresholds of the frames. Art educators have romantic and nostalgic feelings for great works of art; share anecdotes and gossip from their personal lives; tacitly or openly endorse their own political views; love some students more than others; and fight and argue with their groups on art and life matters. Visual images and objects exist in the art educator’s weekly

landscape of growing fears of redundancy; picking up kids after school; and remembering the week’s grocery requirements. Being a member of the congregation of a sacred site in today’s society is only one life role. Cultural affiliation is now more flexibly determined than at any other time in human history. Duncum (1997) suggests that instead of images being viewed in a state of contemplation, they are now viewed in a state of distraction. Like others enmeshed in the academic discourse, he tacitly centers the art museum and implies that contemplation is “good” and naturally “reverent” and distraction is “bad” and “irreverent.” However, life in the late twentieth century is distracting; a dynamic process of observing and contending with multiple frames. Let us return for a moment to the farmer’s wife I earlier described as farm manager; mother, part time doctor’s receptionist, committee member, devotee of a non-mainstream religious group, reader of murder mysteries, vegetarian and internet surfer. How does art and art museums impact upon her life? Why is it in fact necessary for her to be a distracted rather than a contemplative viewer of art? I cannot pretend to know this woman and I accept the crass stereotype I present here with the 2.2-kid family, but I offer this fictional biography, 210

anyway. My farmer’s wife lives just outside Armidale in north-west New South Wales, Australia. She would have more photographs than paintings in her home; be too busy to visit the local art museum although she has visited some whilst on holidays in Sydney and Brisbane; and she is basically in agreement with the local council’s commitment to fund the town’s museum. The painting of her great-grandmother handed down through family generations is one of her most prized possessions. She can see that she has the same hooked nose and close-set eyes. Her children draw occasionally whilst they wait for her to finish her job on the reception desk. She attaches them to the refrigerator with a magnet when she gets home. In the evenings the family watches television together as she goes out to the local technical school to learn how to make her own web page. On Friday nights they rent a video. There is art and art museums in the life of the farmer’s wife but not in the way that academic discourse suggests we should teach people about art and art museums. Our woman is glad that there are collections of paintings in the world. After all, she thinks her great-grandmother’s portrait is precious and irreplaceable. She takes her children to the art museum on a trip to the capital city. She is pleased to show her daughter the “real” painting by Van Gogh that is reproduced on the magnet on the refrigerator. Her son would like to roller skate through the museum like Steve Martin did in that movie they rented last week. Her husband waits outside on the steps reading his newspaper. He doesn’t know much about art, he says, but is happy and inwardly pleased for his wife and children to spend an hour inside. 211

Afterwards, the farmer’s family goes to the nearby MacDonald’s restaurant and argues over whether breasts are rude or not. Pierre Bourdieu (1984), the French sociologist who anatomized the relation between cultural preference and social position, suggested that taste aligns with class. However, I don’t believe that any of us, upper or working class, can function without some sense of distinction in our lives. We make choices and those choices define who we choose to be. What is more

pertinent is Bourdieu’s argument aligning “taste” in the cultural sense with “taste” in the anthropological sense, that is, in the basest terms of life’s essentials. He contends that:

one cannot fully understand cultural practices unless ‘culture,’ in the restricted, normative sense of ordinary usage, is brought back into ‘culture’ in the anthropological sense, and the elaborated taste for the most refined objects is reconnected with the elementary taste for the flavors of food. (1984, p. 1)

Certainly, when we think of art only as paintings in art museums then we are blinded to the deliciousness of quarter-pounders and paintings alike; the family together for a rare day out discussing the nude paintings they saw; the Picasso T-shirts purchased as mementos; and the spectacle of a vivid sunset over our art museum seen through the MacDonald’s window. This mundane day out is a quintessential engagement of all of the frames. Exposing the paradox through multiple frames does not always have to be deep and meaningful. Humor is also a fierce practice of revealing the paradox. Laughing at our human frailties, at the unexpected and the unscheduled, is not trivial nor unscholarly. Oscar Wilde subtitled his play The Importance of Being Earnest with the words, “A Trivial Comedy for 212

Serious People” implying that laughter is an important cultural practice. Laughter is not the opposite of seriousness but its parallel. Academic discourses such as the tightly crafted essay or the political polemic re-inforce suspicions against the flippant wordage and laughter associated with popular culture. It is only in more recent times that the “priests” have allowed areas of license in this field. As William Paul writes:

It is worth keeping in mind that the pleasure principle itself occasions the reality principle. Yet, oddly, in evaluating art we have traditionally granted the latter priority. We talk about “indulging” pleasure, but we never indulge reality. Why not see pleasure itself as the highest good, a good that reality frequently opposes? (1994, p. 77)

The powerful strains of humor and guffaw provide an uncorrected and unconstrained platform for examining life’s peculiarities. Academic discourse has also traditionally avoided “vulgar” feelings like numbness, confusion and disinterest. There has been little curiosity for what has been categorized as the gray, sterile and dreary. Academic discourse is cavalier. It offers a categorical and depersonalized narration of what is right and wrong, delivered in a mode of unequivocal stasis. It perceives of people in terms of being honorable and good. It never perceives of people in terms of being flawed, bored, flatulent, difficult or brusque. And sometimes we can be both good and yet, difficult. Sometimes we can be thoughtful and at other times we can be downright selfish. Likewise, traditional art education discourses never address the state of the person moving between the frames. In art educative terms, it only ever perceives of people in terms of art student, never in terms of other identities such as shopper, lover, misfit or joker. 213

It is important to also conceptualize that the negotiation of meaning does not only take place within institutional/educational boundaries, within the government-issued, painted walls of the school or the art museum, but in multiple sites beyond these traditional structures. As we pull back the frame, we need to become aware of this broader culture as increasingly constituted by commerce – the commodity culture having seeped into every crevice of human mark-making. Through investigating visual representation in the vast commercial realms of Western mass media and purchasable goods, we can begin to see how art informs the relished discourses of consumerism. Buying a piece of the sacred from the mall (a Picasso postcard or T Shirt) becomes synchronous to buying an original Picasso from the auction house. It is only under the dictums of the academic discourse that people are labeled and categorized depending on those choices. A poster of a Picasso has the potential to be revered in much the same way as the original painting. The sacred site of the art museum is everywhere.

In conclusion.

The pedagogic frames through which we can know the art museum are characterized by permeability but simultaneously characterized by incommensurability. No one frame is more important than any other frame. The challenge is to deconstruct and reconstruct the frames; to look anew upon our old and atrophied ways of seeing. 214

Art history is both elapsed and immediate. Looking at, and taking pride in the images and objects of the past means seeing something about ourselves in the present. As Bernhard Schlink suggests, “Doing history means building bridges between the past and the present, observing both banks of the river, taking an active part on both sides” (1997, p. 178). Pointing the finger at the guilty and exposing evil and corruption, can change the dynamics of the world but it does not free us from the shame of

our collective human complicity in their crimes. The finger we point eventually swings back to face each and every individual. In the sensate world of our current and popular culture we purchase possessions to become visible but vanish as we abandon ourselves to be possessed by those possessions. Likewise our visual media sometimes disguises the truths that they are trying to reveal and reveals the truth that we don’t really want to see. Such is the paradox exposed by the multiple frames. We must rise to the ongoing challenges of human obligation, framing and reframing human acts in striving to create a just and humane society. When we engage in multiple frames then the visual art slideshow that freezes into cliché, throbs with a human pulse and we continue the endeavor again.

To summarize.

This dissertation has been based around four frames. The notion of a frame as something that imposes a fixed border has, in itself, delineated and 215

framed this writing. A frame can have multiple signifiers and multiple references. What constitutes its meaning depends on how it is constructed in and of the endless contrivances of these signifiers and references. I used the frame metaphor in multiple ways as a means to deconstruct then reconstruct its meaning. In other words, the word frame was used in multiple ways to deconstruct its closed system and to set the stage for its reconstruction throughout the rest of the dissertation.

The four frames raised were not fixed in meaning and it was the essential act of changing the frames that underlay the pedagogical principles explored through the chapters. The first frame offered an art historical window on the painting, reflecting the discourses of both academics and the wider public over the past two centuries. It noted the painting varyingly as a formalist assembly of stylistic elements (academic discourse); the magical capture of life (popular discourse); and as a metaphor for the art museum, itself. The argument was made that in all of the discourses, the art museum was deified (although in markedly different ways). The art museum was exposed as a sacred site. The second frame looked predominantly at the specific academic discourses that evolved in the 1970s. It was at this time that the frame shifted to place the painting in the context of an art museum. New Museology, as this academic study has been called, demonized and labeled the art museum as an ideological apparatus and paradigm of institutional power. Many academics, artists and critics have used the language of radical critique to build careers for themselves as “experts” of the very institution they so aggressively denounce. 216

Frame 3 suggested that there were other ways of knowing and partaking of the art museum. Revolution, in this case, came stealthily as “marginalized others” created their own art museums in the realms of popular culture. As academics debated the propriety and seemliness of appropriating from popular culture; popular culture had been appropriating the art museum for years. The intermediaries had been removed and the people no longer needed “priests” to teach them the ways of the art museum. The art museum enters their homes, offices and places of entertainment through new reproductive and interactive technologies. The popular environment of Frame 3 provided the frame for an alternative examination of the art museum. In Chapter 3, I explored the representations of the art museum in contemporary, mainstream films although this investigation could easily have occurred in other popular forms such as novels, the internet, television, advertising, art products, cartoons and so on. These films never won prestigious awards nor garnered critical praise. They were, however, by and large popular with mass audiences. I focused on how the art museum was utilized varyingly as a site of religion, passion, violence and wish fulfillment in art museums because these are fundamental attributes and practices of human existence. Frame 4 underscored the whole of this study providing the substance for a new manifesto of art education. It extolled the use of multiple frames to teach about life and death through the images and objects of our world. It did not call for the dismantling of the other frames, although the pedagogy of Frame 4 was one that informed the academic of their potential to be marginalized and irrelevant. It called for all of these frames and more to be 217

utilized in a dynamic, contentious and perpetual process of construction, deconstruction and reconstruction. In the final chapter, I reconstructed the four frames previously constructed and deconstructed in earlier chapters, providing a pedagogical perspective specifically targeting art educators. I argued that there was no right or wrong pedagogy but a range of pedagogies depending on what frame you used to view the visual world. The Pedagogy of the Bridge was about the connection between our human ancestors, us and our potential descendants. It was about cultural benchmarks, our pride in human achievement and our struggles for immortality. The Pedagogy of Contention called for critical engagement with our images and objects. It encouraged our right to openly contest and refigure the construction of pre-existing benchmarks. It was revolutionary and was marked by our collective conscience and shame. It strived to make the world a fairer and more equitable place. The Pedagogy o f Relish was about the sensations of passion and human experience. Here the “priests” had been disbanded and we encountered life directly through the material and popular images and objects of the everyday. The Pedagogy o f Paradox translated and mediated across all of the frames. It revealed the paradoxes of life as we fight over and revere the sacred sites. Visual culture is the collective attempts of society to express their sexuality, desires, fears, emotional attachments, political views, religious beliefs, life experiences and expectations in pictures and things. It is free- form, licentious, aggressive, funny, improvised, give-and-take and ambivalent. Art education needs a new conceptual framework upon which to base future curriculum decisions; one that is mindful of the complexity of 218 human interaction in the cultural environment. Meaning is not only in the images themselves, but in the frisson of personal identities and common experiences. From the aspirations expressed by Rocky Balboa running up the steps of the art museum to the statues of Greek Gods housed in the Parthenon on the hill of the Acropolis; this is the story of art and human beings.

So long and thanks for all the fish. 219

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VITA: SUZANNE OBERHARDT

Suzanne Oberhardt completed a Diploma of Teaching (1977) and a Bachelor of Education (1988) in Visual Arts from the Queensland University of Technology (formerly Kelvin Grove/Brisbane College of Advanced Education) in Brisbane, Australia, an Associate Diploma (1978) in Speech and Drama from the Trinity College, London, and a Master of Science (1996) in Art Education from the Pennsylvania State University. She taught visual arts and performing arts in secondary schools for ten years before lecturing in Art Education at the University of New England in Armidale, Australia. In 1991, she was appointed as the first Public Programs Manager of the New England Regional Art Museum. Working with Director, Joseph Eisenberg, and the Hinton and Coventry Collections of Australian Art sparked a passion for art museums that was to become the basis of her master’s and doctoral research. Whilst studying at the Pennsylvania State University, Suzanne was awarded a graduate teaching assistantship in the School of Visual Arts. On her return to Australia, she resumed teaching at the University of New England for a year before moving to Brisbane. Here she set up her own arts consultancy business, Image Merchants, with two colleagues, wrote the Visual Arts section of the Draft Queensland P-10 Arts Syllabus 2000, lectured in Visual Arts at Griffith University and in Museum Management at the Southbank College of Technical and Further Education. She is currently the Senior Arts Officer - Visual Arts, Craft & Design and Museums, at Arts Queensland. Suzanne is interested in the art museum as an artefact situated in popular culture beyond art historical and new museological frames. She is also interested in critical art theory, new media and hypermedia, material culture studies and cultural studies.