mis/identification
so i return - but perhaps not with good news. over the past weeks i have considered the following: (1) writing fiction. (2) moving to Texas - early. (3) going to library science school and becoming an archivist. (4) subsequently giving up my thesis. (5) adopting a cat, curbing lonliness. (6) becoming a journalist. … and so on. the list continues. my thesis is starting to feel like a burden once again, and i’m tempted to scrap this third topic and start again. but how many times can i start again? i’ve already done it once, or maybe two or three times, with no result other than that i embark on an exciting new subject that i can fully expect will begin to weigh on me when i realize that it is too massive for me to treat in a thirty page paper.
so my current inability to handle this project at times makes me feel like a mega-wimp. so many other people accomplished where i failed. yes, my thought train goes here sometimes… maybe too much… however, i realize that this fact opens new possibilities to me. my desire to become a being of constantly accumulating knowledge, more of a generalist, branching out from art and institutional studies, to literature and travel writing, history and modern languages. I have always had widely divergent interestes - as a child, i loved science, literature, and history… anyway, sometimes i imagine myself as an archivist or a book dealer, one that holes herself up in a small storefront overflowing with books, or protector of some realm of knowledge that would become my own world. sometimes i have a truley nineteenth-century disposition. and a romantic soul.
regarding my thesis, however, it’s not that i don’t enjoy the research. i really love to accumulate perspectives to a situation, in this case turn of the century Chicago, and to really feel that i know something. reading the history of Chicago has, as I had hoped, given me new reasons to brood over the contemporary public and cultural spaces here. i have made several trips down town, to different museums this month. i love watching people there. i love following groups of people around who seem to be talking about the architecture of the place or trying to learn or find meaning in one of our museums. i am very curious about the educational process that takes place (whether or not successfully) in museums, although i tire of the conversations currently taking place in museum studies: about info-tainment, ‘disnification’ of knowledge, aesthetic/ethnographic subjectification, private patronage, etc. etc. Most of what I read about museums is either dire - pessimistic, cynical - or (dare i say it) boring.
But still, my favorite place is the Field here in Chicago. it is truly a museum of museums. each exhibit is SO different, each telling of a different approach to the cultures they represent. one of the strangest juxtapositions i saw there was the exhibit on africa, which situates you in small communities in differing countries there - and it is a very interesting attempt to give a midwestern american such as myself an idea of a very different contemporary culture. you "meet" a family, and through likenesses and videos you learn about their familial structure, rituals, way of life, et cetera. another part of the exhibit shows how africans who live in the desert can stand the heat. anyway, so you spend about half an hour here, and suddenly you step onto a slave boat. it’s very dramatic, and a bit archaic, to go from contemporary africa to post colonial america. i still don’t know what to make of it - it’s not the ’slave trade’ exhibit i disagree with, but the manner in which it was transitioned directly and abruptly from a genuine attempt to exhibit african culture in a non-objectifying way. compare this to ‘exhibits of africans’ at worlds fairs in the 19th century if you know anything about that. but i wonder what an exhibit of the contemporary american would look like.
December 15th, 2005 at 1:41 pm
Hey– I know what you mean about contemporary museum studies. Look at it this way– when working on your thesis, make sure to make it clear that you understand what the conversation is, but I think it’s okay to let you know that you think other concerns should be relevant, i.e., “infotainment” is relevant, but in our day and age entertainment and education is melded in such a way that this is hardly even disputible anymore, and it’s not necessarily such a horrible, horrible thing. Whenever I hear disparaging comments to that effect, I just remind people about how awesome Bill Nye the Science Guy was. Because of him, I know what dioxiribonucleic acid is, and that the brain is mostly a fatty organ. Wow!
Lovies,
t