Wednesday, June 9, 2010

Why are Museums about Writing so Interesting?


I’ve written before about the Bulgakov Museum in Kyiv, one of my favorite museums in Ukraine Just recently, I’ve been in two other museums devoted to writing and writers that made me consider why it is that museums about words are so good at using ideas, not just words, to convey their story. 



First, the Franz Kafka Museum in Prague.  A new museum, located right on the river, it’s a highly theatrical presentation of Kafka’s life and work in Prague.  Like most people, I know of Kafka, but am not terribly familiar with his work.  The exhibits do a great job of integrating his life, his work, and the city of Prague.   The museum is mostly in shades of gray, black and white,  and uses several theatrical devices to connect the story.  A curled scrim shows a ghostly rotating view of Yiddish theater;  a section about a circular life includes materials installed in flat circular cases, lit from above.  The women in Kafka’s life are highlighted in individual cases that are transparent from front to back, giving a sense of his complicated personal life.   At one point, you enter a dark narrow space filled with the reflective glass fronts of file cabinets and dotted with ringing phones.  You pick up the phones and someone is speaking.  The sense of futility, of no way out, is palpable.   It’s a pretty great installation when you leave wanting to read Kafka, as I did (but haven’t yet).


The Kafka Museum in Prague appears to have substantial resources but this week I visited another exhibit in a much smaller museum, with much more limited resources:  the Literature Museum in Kharkiv, Ukraine.  The museum was founded after the end of the Soviet Union and it is a great testament to that fact that ideas don’t cost money.Their permanent exhibit explores Ukrainian writers in the 20th century.    The exhibit carries a strong conception of the narrative of those writers and the changes brought both the advent and decline of the Soviet Union, and that conceptual strength is assisted by the inventive efforts of design students.  

This could have been an opportunity to see an exhibit that was just a big line-up of books.  But instead,  enormous photographs and a timeline line the full exhibit.  Each room looks at a different time period,  and the extended text labels about the books shown are not installed directly with the book, but contained in folders for browsing.



The last three rooms were the most memorable to me.   Ukrainians (and I believe I have this right) have a phrase describing those who go into themselves,  going into a “blue world.”  In this “blue world,’   photographs with blanks for faces show the writers who were imprisoned or killed.   In the next room, the Soviet story is in full sway:  Soviet leaders hover over a giant tower of Soviet books.  Around the walls of the room,  the top shelves show those the works of writers who prospered during the Soviet Union;  a lower shelf, those who accommodated; and the very bottom shelf,  the works of those who resisted.   But there’s a double meaning:  not only does that bottom shelf represent the suppressed writers, but said the exhibit's co-curator,  “it’s a little sign of respect as we bow down to look at them.”


The final room is dedicated to the post-Soviet period.  Hand-designed wall-paper includes images of today’s Ukrainian writers;  a suggestion of a coffeehouse, with notepaper replacing napkins in their ever-present holder and a television with books inside, all provide a way to consider the new world that independence has brought.  The world of ideas, the world inside a writer’s mind, is made real in all these exhibitions.  We had a lively discussion, in a café, about whether this was because writer’s museums are about ideas and other museums are just about objects—what do you think?

4 comments:

  1. Bear with me..I'm working this out as I write. Maybe it's because museums are really about stories, but when those stories are embedded in objects, museums get confused and behave as if its all about the object. Mass produced books are, as objects, pretty boring. Even the beautiful ones are best appreciated by being handled, and flipped through--something museums aren't going to allow if the book is "the object." So a good museum of literature goes straight to the story, instead, visualizing and expanding on it in all the imaginative, playful ways a museum can.

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  2. It's a nice reminder for us to remember that all museums should be full of ideas. I have that quote by Goode at my desk at work: "The people's museum should be much more than a house full of specimens in glass cases. It should be a house full of ideas." Your pictures from the museums in Europe are inspiring. I've loved the times I've spent in that area too- East Germany and the Czech Republic, that is.

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  3. Beth--thanks--and I agree, books on their own are often (unless you're the Book of Kells, perhaps) pretty boring--and even the Book of Kells has a great supporting exhibit in Dublin. But the idea that museums get confused is exactly right--but what I find, both here and there, is that the confusion about what we're about, is often paired with a pretty stubborn perspective that being about objects or information, not stories, is the only way! Rebecca--great quote--and thanks for liking the pictures. I have other photographers in the family, so only think of mine as snapshots, but hope they convey a bit of life, and museums here. Coming up next: Budapest!

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  4. You will be pleased to know that colleagues and I have initiated a project to build The American Writers Museum. You will find basic information at our website.

    Malcolm O'Hagan
    President AWMF

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