Open Air Exhibitions

I've seen two interesting open air history exhibitions this spring, a permanent (or at least semi-permanent) one in Alexanderplatz, Berlin about the fall of the Berlin Wall:And a temporary (one month) one in the Kamppi plaza in Helsinki about Warsaw Pact countries and their efforts to shed Communism during the Soviet Union's final years:I watched a steady stream of people checking out both of these exhibitions. With the Kamppi exhibition, I think one of the reasons people stopped to investigate was that it presented an unexpected change to a public space that was otherwise very familiar. In other words, if you walk through Kamppi plaza every day on your commute and suddenly the landscape changes, you want to know why. I'm interested in the idea of inserting some public history into public spaces for just a month or two so that it becomes an event, as opposed to those permanent historic markers on buildings that start to blend into the background and almost become invisible over time. There's also the concept of it being right in the middle of your path, instead of having to make an active choice to walk into a museum to see an exhibition. I'm wondering if this would be a good thing to try in Boston, perhaps at Quincy Market, or along the Esplanade?

Historical Art in Public Places

Forgive the recent silence; I have been preoccupied by a tough deadline. I was asked to write about my city museum research for a collection of essays on cities and memory, to be published (in Finnish) by the Finnish Literature Society. Now that I have sent my draft off to the editor, I can turn my attention back to you, dear reader.One of the topics I discuss in my essay is historically-themed public art. I think it can be a particularly interesting way to interpret city history, and at the same time build meaningful urban spaces. Here are a few examples of particularly successful pieces:First, there’s the sculpture pictured above, at the beginning of the post. It’s Balancing Act by Stephan Balkenhol, on Axel-Springer-Strasse in Berlin. It poignantly marks the borderland of the Berlin Wall with a larger-than-life figure of a man, perched on a section of the Wall as if it were a tightrope. The effect is iconographic: anyone who knows even a little bit about the history of Berlin immediately gets the message with no need for complicated interpretation.I also love this piece in Philadelphia. In 1976 architects Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown recreated the frame of Benjamin Franklin’s former house, just off Market Street. Nicknamed the Ghost House, it is an evocative and award-winning piece that writes Franklin back into the landscape of the city he so influenced.And here’s a project from 1989 in Los Angeles, Biddy Mason Park. It’s a collaboration between the architectural historian Dolores Hayden and two artists, Betye Saar and Shelia Levrant de Bretteville. The park commemorates the site of Biddy Mason’s home with two pieces of historical art. Biddy Mason was a slave who petitioned and won her freedom in the courts in 1856. She also eventually owned a significant amount of property in what is now downtown LA. While she was well known in her own community, she was not particularly remembered by mainstream American history until this project came along. She was a midwife and healer, and embedded in the concrete wall are impressions of objects from her everyday life—a midwife’s bag, a medicine bottle, scissors, a spool of thread.This is an interesting one that suggests possibilities for city history, even if it’s not quite that itself. Denise Ziegler’s 1999 Epigrams for Helsinki Citizens consists of messages cast into eight manhole covers throughout the city. It’s the kind of special thing you have to know about and look for, promoting a sense of discovery and belonging.And this is Edge of the Trees by Janet Laurence and Fiona Foley, outside the Museum of Sydney. It symbolizes the first contact between the two cultures, when Arther Phillip's First Fleet sailed into Sydney Harbor in 1788 while the area's aboriginal people watched from the shore.Here’s one that’s a little more abstract: the Chicago Bean, formally titled Cloud Gate, by Anish Kapoor. While its connections to Chicago history aren’t that direct, I love that its highly-reflective surface acts as a mirror, situating each viewer in relation to the city skyline: in case you have forgotten, you are here, in Chicago. That's right, Chicago.And lastly, here’s a lovely little memorial that's halfway hidden, at Suomenlinna, the old island fortress in Helsinki Harbor. It alludes to the 1918 Civil War in Finland, an event that still isn’t completely resolved in the country’s collective memory. After the war, one of the prison camps for Red soldiers (the side that lost) was established on Suomenlinna. There was a food shortage throughout Finland, and food was particularly scarce in the prison camps. Thousands of prisoners eventually died of hunger and disease in 1918 and 1919 at Suomenlinna and in the other prison camps. Marja Kanervo, who created the memorial, explains how it works: “The years cut in the broken bedrock will disappear as slowly as the marks of violence, stretching over generations. In addition to being a physical contact to the silent world of the dead, the rippling water is also a wearing tool, which, like time, shall finally do its task. Until then, the emotions and traumatic memories stirred by the artwork take place in the present.”I lived in Washington, DC in the late 1990s. It’s a city full of neoclassical architecture meant to visually reinforce the power of the American federal government. It’s also full of public art in the form of memorials: some that are treasured by the public—the Lincoln and Washington monuments, Maya Lin’s groundbreaking Vietnam Veterans Memorial—but also a lot of dead white men, made of bronze or stone, with or without horses, that get little attention these days. I’m sure those military men and city fathers were important and known to past generations, but most of them have been forgotten with the march of time. I remember once while I was living in DC I made a trip to Cleveland and was caught off-guard by the contemporary public art there—colorful pieces, abstract pieces, pieces I doubted would ever get through committee in DC. My point being that each generation writes its own history, and therefore our commemorations and allusions to it through public art need to be a continuous process that never stops. Which is why I find this temporary piece made for a Helsinki festival in 2005 intriguing:It’s called Time Signal, by Elina Lifländer and Eliisa Suominen, and it creates a dialogue between a statue of the poet Eino Leino created in 1953 and the present day. I couldn’t find much online about the artists’ intent—I think the female silhouette may represent the writer Onerva Lehtinen, his lover—but even simply imagining the possibilities is interesting.I’m going to end with a few public spaces I’ve encountered in my explorations over the past few months that seem to be screaming for public art:The courtyard of the Stockholm City Museum. I was there on the cusp of the tourist season, so maybe it doesn’t stay this empty all summer long. And I’m sure there are good reasons to keep it a flexible, programmable space. But can’t you imagine some colorful and intriguing historical public art as a centerpiece?Tunnelgatan, also in Stockholm. This is a very long, public tunnel near the center of the city that saves you from walking up a steep flight of stairs only to go back down another one. Right now, its yellow walls are bare. Hmmm.And finally, this is an old gasometer (or gas holder) in Helsinki, just northeast of city centre. Gasometers are used to store natural gas; they are more common in Europe than in the US. This particular one is part of an abandoned industrial complex that is slated for redevelopment as a cultural center. In Dresden, the architect Yadegar Asisi transformed one of these gasometers into a 360 panorama of the 18th-century city. You can stand in the center and be enveloped by 1756 Dresden. Asisi did a similar panorama of 312 Rome for a gasometer in Leipzig; in 2009 it was replaced by a view of the Amazon rain forest. What should Helsinki do with its gasometer?

City Museums in the 21st Century

There’s a new collection of essays about city museums that just came out in paperback: City Museums and City Development, ed. by Ian Jones, Robert R. Macdonald, and Darryl McIntyre (AltaMira Press, 2010). In the coming weeks I intend to blog about several of these essays. Let’s start today with a statement made by Chet Orloff in “Museums of Cities and the Future of Cities.” Orloff is a professor of Urban Studies and Planning at Portland State University in Oregon, and from 1991-2001 was the director of the Oregon Historical Society. In his essay he writes:

The nineteenth century was, broadly speaking, the century of the history and the natural history museum, an era of exploration and a fitting time for the growth and popularity of ‘cabinets of curiosities.’ The twentieth century was very much the century of the art museum, a time of building deep collections and great buildings, with far-ranging advances in the visual arts. The twenty-first century—when cities will be, even more, the places where people live and where so much will happen—ought to be the moment of the city museum. (p.27)

Alexanderplatz Exhibition

Alexanderplatz Exhibition

In 2007 it was widely reported that the world was on the verge of a population shift, where for the first time half the global population would be living in cities. Indeed, by 2030 it is predicted that nearly two thirds of the global population will be urban. Several essays in City Museums and City Development refer to this shift, and it seems to be on the minds of many city museum professionals as they envision the future of their work. Orloff, in the above quote, is calling for city museums to take the opportunity presented by 21st-century global urbanization to position themselves at the very center of their communities: “not merely to collect and share historical knowledge, but to help change and shape the lives of our cities and their citizens.” (p.29) He thinks city museums can transform themselves by creating global collaborations with their sister museums in other cities, by participating more fully in the urban planning process in their cities, and by bringing history out onto the streets. My first reaction when I read this essay was to think yeah, whatever. I’ve heard this kind of talk before, and yet city museums still continue to suffer from poor visitation relative to their sister art museums, persistent funding problems, the public perception of history as bitter-tasting medicine, and the lack of a concrete, achievable plan as to how they can get from where they are now to that place at the center of their communities. But I’m trying to give Orloff the benefit of the doubt and think a little harder about it. And so I’m wondering if what might save us, what could possibly make city museums the darlings of the 21st century, is Orloff’s call for us to take to the streets, coupled with an emerging technological tool: GPS. History can be so place-based. Over the years I’ve watched thousands of museum visitors become enthralled with the prospect of “standing in the spot” where some significant historical event happened, or where some significant historical figure lived and worked. But for years, city museums have been in the business of gathering up artifacts and stories from all over the city and consolidating them in one building, in most cases severed from their original historical places. Which leads me to a great quote from another essay in this book, Jack Lohman’s “The Prospect of a City Museum:” “Why is it that city museums often seem as if the city had departed?” (p.61) In other words, in the process of rounding everything up and organizing it in glass cases in ritualized galleries, city museums often lose a lot of the energy, complexity, and constant change that makes us love cities so much in the first place; they lose the city itself. The recent pervasiveness of GPS technology may present a new opportunity for us to send history back out into the city, out into the energy of the streets, creating moments of “standing in the spot” on every corner. People have been talking about “museums without walls” for years, but this would be slightly different, and possibly more powerful. It would mean reconnecting all those severed links between history and place, and helping the public see the layers of history hidden underneath the present-day city. For example, as I envisioned in my Friendville post , we could program mobile devices to call up historical views of the city—photos or paintings—as you walk past their vantage points in the modern city. And in Boston over the past few years I’ve been working on a project for the Bostonian Society that involves mapping all the people, places, and events from Revolutionary Boston, both online and in an IPhone application, so that we can expand past the traditional notion of the Freedom Trail to interpret 18th-century Boston with much more complexity, all over downtown. In addition, while I was in Berlin in March, I noticed that an open-air exhibition at Alexanderplatz about political protest and the fall of the Wall included artifacts, in special outdoor cases. While the collections manager in me wants to be very careful not to damage precious artifacts by subjecting them to bright sunlight, security risks, and extreme changes in climate, maybe our exhibition case technology has advanced far enough that putting large numbers of objects out on the streets is not such a far-fetched idea. At the very least, we could add a GPS coordinate field to our new online collections databases. All of this GPS work takes a lot of time and money. But maybe it’s a compelling enough idea to fuel Orloff’s vision of the 21st-century city museum. We’ve got 90 years left to prove him right or wrong. Let’s get to work.