Description
Book SynopsisThis is an innovative interdisciplinary book about objects and people within museums and galleries. It addresses fundamental issues of human sensory, emotional and aesthetic experience of objects. The chapters explore ways and contexts in which things and people mutually interact, and raise questions about how objects carry meaning and feeling, the distinctions between objects and persons, particular qualities of the museum as context for person-object engagements, and the active and embodied role of the museum visitor.
Museum Materialities is divided into three sections Objects, Engagements and Interpretations and includes a foreword by Susan Pearce and an afterword by Howard Morphy. It examines materiality and other perceptual and ontological qualities of objects themselves; embodied sensory and cognitive engagements both personal and across a wider audience spread with particular objects or object types in a museum or gallery setting; notions
Table of Contents
Foreword 1. Introduction: Materiality And Matter Reality In The Museum Part I: Objects 2. The Eyes Have It: Eye Movements And The Debatable Differences Between Original Objects And Reproductions 3. Artefacts Re-Made 4. Touching The Buddha: An Extraordinary Object Demanding A Response 5. Photographs And History: Emotion And Materiality 6. Virginia Woolf's Glasses: Material Encounters In The Literary/Artistic House Museum 7. Using Objects To Remember The Dead And Affect The Living: The Case Of A Miniature Model Of Treblinka Part II: Engagements 8. Contemporary Sculpture: An Immaterial Practice 9. When Ethnographies Enter Art Galleries: Viewing Violence And Inhabiting Other's Beauty 10. Visitors, Bodies And Forms In Australian Journeys 11. Not Just Looking: Embodiment And Encounter In The Contemporary Art Museum 12. Playing With Museum Encounters: Art, Materiality And The Aesthetics Of Engagement 13. Perceptions Of Edinburgh: Weight, Vision And Movement In The Northern City Exhibition Part III : Interpretations 14. 'A Thing Is A Thing. Why Bother?' On A Sensory Interpretive Project Involving Chinese Ceramics 15. Churchill Re-Imagined: History, Memory And The Senses And The Modern Museum 16. Children Feeling Africa In The Museum 17. Beyond Display, Making Meaning 18. Beyond Words: Interpreting The Unspeakable? Afterword
