Friday 13 January 2017

Giving Life to Objects


Giving Life to Objects

Besides our new friends revealing to me that I have been pronouncing the names of my Australian Vietnamese friends incorrectly my whole life, each museum visit has enhanced my conception of Vietnamese culture and museum practice. 

Just as my experience of Vietnam and Vietnamese culture has been based on my previous personal experience, I don’t doubt that each individual museum visitor holds a unique perspective and motivation that requires a constructivist approach to presenting exhibitions. The constructivist approach involves more than the method of presenting information. It means understanding that when visitors come to the museum they are invariably building on their own narratives of personal identity.

Whilst it is easy to consider visitor as belonging to one of the five categories described out by Falk & Derkling.1 more recent research by Falk proposes that the most common motivations people hold for visiting the museum are identity centered.2 After interviewing visitors at the Vietnam Museum of Fine Arts it was clear that individuals each held their own set of motivations. Although each could be considered to fit within these museum visitor clusters there was certainly no precise place for anyone. This might be the reason that although we interviewed many of the same people, some groups placed them in different categories. Regardless of such, the way that these visitors expressed their museum experience was completely based personal reflections and comparisons.

Having minimal didactic information for the individual artworks facilitated these reflections. You don’t have to be an art historian to appreciate the aesthetic qualities or stimulate a personal connection with an artwork. It’s not that artworks speak for themselves, it’s that people speak for the artworks using their own thoughts. The Museum encourages this and is able to use this to their advantage with foreign visitors to the museum (especially those that don’t speak French, Vietnamese or English). Museum objects don’t differ from Artworks in this way. They both stimulate diverse interpretations according to the individual engaging with such.   

If each individual brings with them a set of expectations that is based on their personal narratives, how can the museum convey the intended meaning to their objects?

It is human nature to want to understand the stories of others. Empathy is an evolutionary trait that developed to connect individual group members to strengthen group cooperation. There is a positive relationship between empathy and memory.3 Meaning it is useful in creating memorable museum experiences. The least interesting museum experiences over the past two weeks in Vietnam have been those who don’t consider this an important element of their exhibitions.

The National Museum of History in Hanoi is an example of this downfall. Using the behaviorist method for displaying their objects, they fail to invite any audience engagement outside of having a children’s ‘Discovery Centre’. It was of no surprise to me when our new Vietnamese friend Lian explained that people his age don’t care about going to the museum because history is boring. This Museum perpetuates this misconception, not only with their displays but also with their disregard for the modern leisure consumer.

The Women in History display in the Vietnam Women’s Museum(VWM) diverges from this approach by demonstrating that objects can be brought to life through personal narratives and visitor empathy. The exhibition used objects as a catalyst to not only communicate history but also make it relevant again using empathy. 



 
This video from VWM is worth watching. It shows the creativity in the Museum's exhibitions.



 References

1. Falk, J. H., & Dierking, L. D. (2012). Museum experience revisited. Left Coast Press.
2. Falk, J. in, Davis, A., & Smeds, K. (2016). Visiting the Visitor: An Enquiry Into the Visitor Business in Museums.
3. Wagner, U., Handke, L., & Walter, H. (2015). The relationship between trait empathy and memory formation for social vs. non-social information. BMC psychology, 3(1), 1.

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