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.