According to Stephen Greenblatt\u2019s article, \u201cResonance and Wonder,\u201d we interpret history, just as we interpret works of art. The social practices that we study aren\u2019t immediately accessible to us. We read about them. And their relevance to the present are not static either; the connection between the circumstances in which the text was written and our own are dynamic, rendering the idea of a \u201ccorrect\u201d or \u201cvalid\u201d interpretation meaningless. Therefore, the key to interpreting historical texts or art is to contextualize the issue of interest, or more specifically, to make cultural connections at a given moment in both its history and our own.<\/p>\n
Greenblatt argues that it is this contextualization of objects that leads to\u00a0resonance, or the ability of an object to evoke cultural connections in the viewer.\u00a0In order to contextualize displayed objects in museums, Greenblatt suggests that museums be more willing to get in touch with \u201caesthetic openness,\u201d that is, share with the public details that show the object’s fragility \u2013 its wear and tear and state of imperfection that give insight into the circumstances in which the object came about.<\/p>\n
Greenblatt\u2019s idea of \u201caesthetic openness\u201d reminded me of an installation\u00a0that I saw last winter at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA) called \u201cHome within Home within Home within Home within Home\u201d by Do Ho Suh. It\u2019s a life-size, fabric installation of the house where Doh lived when he was studying art in Providence, Rhode Island. By meticulously measuring every inch of the apartment where he was residing and making a precise and detailed cast of it out of fabric, the artist defined a \u201chome\u201d as one’s intimate, clothing(skin)-like space. The installation includes not so perfect hand-stitched door-knobs, crooked etches of Doh\u2019s and his American neighbors’ names on the mail box,\u00a0cracks in the\u00a0windows and wear and tear of the Victorian facade\u00a0\u2013 details that seem to reach out and pull the viewer into not only the embedded message or theme of the object but also the artist’s surrounding.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
According to Stephen Greenblatt\u2019s article, \u201cResonance and Wonder,\u201d we interpret history, just as we interpret works of art. The social practices that we study aren\u2019t immediately accessible to us. We … Continue reading “Week 2 Blog Post”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":28,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_eb_attr":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-226","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh150w16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/226","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh150w16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh150w16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh150w16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/28"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh150w16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=226"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh150w16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/226\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh150w16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=226"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh150w16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=226"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh150w16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=226"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}