Category: Berlin - Dr. Stephanie Pearson

Essay on Museum and the City - Out of the Ground, Into Awareness

12/18/2019

An essay of mine about museum displays of antiquities appeared today in Museum and the City, the official blog of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin (Berlin State Museums)! You may recall that I led a student workshop in the temporary museum called "Pergamonmuseum. Das Panorama." This essay is a writeup of the themes I presented there and then workshopped with the students in the exhibition. Archaeology, museum methodology, and teaching - just my cup of tea!

Because the essay is in German, an English summary is in order (see also this previous post):

The antiquities we see on display in museums constitute only a tiny part of the objects found in excavation, and those in turn form only a tiny part of the material that actually existed back then. The selection process between being buried in the ground and being exhibited in a museum is rigorous. It includes the decision of where to excavate, what to do with the excavated material, and what material is chosen for exhibition—based on money, available space, and the personal interest of museum staff and visitors. Sometimes the decisions are carefully made, while sometimes coincidence or luck takes over (it does happen that excavations miss an important find by just a few centimeters, leaving it undiscovered). Realizing that there is a complex process behind the scenes is one step towards understanding museums as a laboratory, not a finished presentation of a topic we know everything about. The "Pergamonmuseum. Das Panorama" exhibition is great for driving this home because the explanatory texts often mention uncertainty or differing scholarly opinions. For visitors this can be exciting, or unnerving—but either way it promotes the critical thinking skills we need to deal with our modern world.

Comparing Beyond Compare - Bode Museum

11/19/2019

Last chance to see the exhibition "Beyond Compare" (Unvergleichlich) in Berlin's Bode Museum! The show closes this coming Sunday. In terms of display, this was an interesting intervention into the medieval collections: African objects were set up near pieces that they could have a dialogue with, about one topic or another. The Congolese statue above served as a way to maintain order and ward off evil, just as, the curators suggest, the Mary statue in the background did. The direct visual juxtaposition helps make the point clear, and it certainly opens new avenues for thinking about the function of such pieces: they were not merely "art" in the very modern way we might think of it, but had a concrete purpose almost akin to magic. At the same time, the exhibition text notes that such comparisons are inherently biased and thus problematic. Yet the display asks us to compare.... It's worth visiting for both its innovations and problems!

Vote for the best interpretation - Museum of Islamic Art, Berlin

9/20/2019

Museum displays can do so much more than simply present information. They can get us thinking about some of the most important questions there are: What do we really know? How can we know that? How can we find out more? To my mind, encouraging people to ask these questions is one of the most important tasks of a museum. (I'm a broken record!) That's why I was thrilled to see a display in the Museum of Islamic Art in Berlin that aims in this direction—the second of two hands-on displays that struck me. A gorgeous plate from 16th-century Iran offers the starting point. It is painted with a zodiac, leading to questions about its function—which have led to multiple hypotheses, which so far have yielded no definitive answer. How to show this uncertainty in the museum texts? (Another favorite topic of mine!)

The solution in this case is a series of text panels, each explaining one possible function of the plate. They are labeled A, B, C, and D, and are bound by two large steel rings that allow the visitor to page through them (photo above). In addition, to the right of the panels are four small slots with the same lettering; by slipping a coin into one of the slots, you can vote for the interpretation you find best! The side of the display case (photo right) reveals the clear tubes that the coins drop into, a visual marker of the most popular answers. (If the denominations of the coins is ignored and the popularity is measured by sheer number and thickness of the coins...) Money talks? But the proceeds benefit the museum foundation, and ultimately I quite like the way this interactive display encourages critical thinking.

Touchable Tapestry Technique - Museum of Islamic Art, Berlin

9/20/2019

The Museum of Islamic Art in Berlin is proud of its carpet collection. Rightly so: not only are the carpets special in themselves, but they have a tumultuous history. The permanent display that opened last year (well, permanent until it shuffles around again for the reopening of the Pergamon Museum) conveys some of how the objects came to the museum—many through private collectors involved in the "oriental" research popular in late 19th- and early 20th-century Germany—and how they fared in World War II. While the carpet exhibition is fairly traditional in its display, a couple features stood out to me. One is pictured above: large panels demonstrating three different weaving techniques. Thick colorful plastic cord is used instead of the usual fine threads to make the technique more visible. Visitors can turn each panel to see both sides and thus discover the difference between kilim and pile rugs. Namely, kilim (left) are woven such that both sides are flat, while pile rugs (with symmetrical or asymmetrical knots, center and right) result in one side being bristled with the ends of the knots poking out. It's one of the few hands-on displays in the museum, and certainly fun to play with! It's vaguely reminiscent of the weave-it-yourself activity in the Museum of European Cultures in Berlin, but better suited to the far greater number of visitors passing through the Pergamon Museum.

Labels Now and Then - Gemäldegalerie, Berlin

9/7/2019

I'm a sucker for exhibitions about making exhibitions! And who doesn't love a peek behind the curtain into the inner workings? A show at the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin until the end of this month focuses on the "Labels of an Exhibition"—how they changed over time and what this tells us about changing priorities. Reminds me of other shows, about nose jobs and frame games of the past...

First Impressions - Haus Bastian, Berlin

9/5/2019

Just across the canal from Berlin’s Museum Island is a stately building that has just joined the museum family. The Haus Bastian was designed by architect David Chipperfield, like the Neues Museum and the brand new James-Simon-Galerie that it faces across the water. The Bastian family long used this lofty building as a gallery of modern and contemporary art—last year I got to see its last show, which included Wim Wenders’ photographs and Dan Flavin’s lights. Now, however, the family has donated the building to Berlin’s state museums for use as an educational center. It celebrated its opening two nights ago with a first glimpse at the spaces and materials available for experience-hungry kids, families, adults, and teachers.

One of the current programs is titled "One to one? Pictures and Copies" (Eins zu eins? Von Bildern und Abbildern). Kids are invited to partake in "Project Days" exploring form through clay and plaster impressions, sometimes of their own bodies. The project materials include little busts of Nefertiti (above), miniatures based on the Neues Museum’s blockbuster portrait of the ancient Egyptian queen. Exhibiting multiple tiny white copies of the portrait is a playful way to draw attention to its physical characteristics: these Nefertitis are not like the original, not the face to launch a thousand posters and coffee mugs—but physical things with certain lines, curves, and volumes. (Replicas were also used in stimulating ways in this show.) The arrangement of the busts in various positions emphasizes this even more. In groups of four, they form a pattern that obscures the uniqueness and importance of The One Irreplaceable Treasure. Upside-down, the busts turn into weird forms like Wall-E or a large rubber stamp with an offset handle. Playing with museum objects like this builds visual skills and creativity—just what this center hopes to do in many other ways as well. I’m eager to see how this endeavor proceeds.

Clothes Racks without Hangups - Schwules Museum, Berlin

8/22/2019

Through Monday you can still catch the wonderful show My Dearest Sweet Love: Christopher Isherwood & Don Bachardy at the Schwules Museum in Berlin. What a wonderful compliment to the experience of reading Isherwood's books. What's more, Bachardy's paintings are truly stunning; the male nude series (here are some examples from 2002) took my breath away. He paints with such economy, capturing complex muscles in scant brushstrokes. His use of color also blew my mind—and he must paint very quickly, since the many colors that bleed into one another could only do so if all wet at once. I wanted desperately to buy a catalog of the show, but sadly there isn't one.

What I was able to take home with me, however, was an idea on display! In the exhibition LOVE AT FIRST FIGHT! Queer Movements in Germany since Stonewall (through fall 2020), the display is based entirely on simple clothes racks. They were spray-painted in red, a nod to the protests and homemade signs of the movements in the title. The racks were used in three ways:

hung with clothes hangers reduced to just the hook and a clip which held paper materials (photo above left: exhibition guides in different languages)
strung with protest signs evoking those from past movements (photo above right; slogan T-shirt hung beside). It was wonderful to be able to take these into your hand. For me, it sparked the realization of how difficult it could be to physically partake in protests in which your body is the subject of debate.
ringed with zipties which fastened to the corners of laminated sheets. The sheets consisted of regular paper printed with various texts and pictures, each one attached at all four corners to the nearby sheets or to the clothes rack—almost like a patchwork quilt. (No photo; I didn't want to bother the visitors using those displays!)

This is an incredibly simple and effective means of display, not to mention cost-effective; IKEA sells clothes racks like this for under $10! Three cheers for the Schwules Museum and these two wonderful exhibitions. I'll definitely be coming back for future shows.

Photography Encouraged - Gemäldegalerie, Berlin

6/25/2019

Last week I was treated to a special tour of the current Mantegna + Bellini show at Berlin's Gemäldegalerie, thanks to a generous friend and colleague over at ART-THINKING. Because it was a whirlwind of intense looking and learning, I didn't take any pictures until the last second—upon leaving the gallery, seeing the sign above. The design of the sign is good, using a happy face to communicate nonverbally. The encouragement to share images using the museum's hashtag is a clever way to crowd-publicize. More than that, I was impressed that the curators managed to get permission from all of the loaning institutions to allow visitors to photograph these incredible artworks! They deserve extra cheers for that.

This beautiful show is still open for five more days, closing June 30.

Creating Knowledge Together: Pergamonmuseum. Das Panorama

6/6/2019

Museum display is just the last step in an ancient object's long life. This is the topic of a student workshop I'll be leading on Saturday in Berlin's Pergamonmuseum. Das Panorama. What is selected for display? What is researched, and how? What gets left out? How is the "knowledge" that the museum finally decides to communicate created? All of these are subjective processes, despite the impression that the "knowledge" presented in museums is singular, objective, and perfectly known. As Ian Hodder famously said, "Interpretation begins at the trowel's edge"—at the moment of excavation. (And, I argue, actually before that, since excavations are sited and carried out based on decisions as well.)
As part of our exploration we'll closely examine the museum labels. I was inspired by those in the interim Pergamonmuseum because they often express a certain uncertainty or scholarly debate about the objects, which I found refreshing. Not just refreshing: it brings us to think critically, one of the most important things a museum display can bring us to do! (But I repeat myself.)
All Berlin higher-ed students are welcome! The details (in German, as the event will be):

Unsicherheit und Debatte in Museumstexten: Wissen zur Antike gemeinsam bauen
Sa / 8. 6. 2019 / 15 – 17.30 Uhr
Treffpunkt: Pergamonmuseum. Das Panorama, Besucherinformation
Keine Anmeldung erforderlich. Die Teilnahme ist für Studierende kostenfrei.

Das Format TISCHGESPRÄCH findet im Rahmen von ABOUT THE MUSEUM statt, einer Initiative des Referats Bildung, Vermittlung, Besucherdienste. Weitere Informationen: studierende.smb.museum und auf Facebook: ABOUT THE MUSEUM.

The Rise and Felling of Monuments: Zitadelle Spandau

4/29/2019

A permanent exhibition in the Zitadelle Spandau puts not only honorific statues but display itself in the spotlight. Unveiled: Berlin and Its Monuments thematizes the city's long history of erecting statues of various personalities, only to remove them later when the political landscape changes. What deserves to stand on public display, and when? Looking at these statues from the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries makes clear how changeable the landscape of monuments is.

Perhaps most striking is a head of Lenin, once part of a colossal monument on the United Nations Plaza in East Berlin (left) but dismantled after Germany's reunification. A comprehensive disposal plan was lacking, leading to the disassembled pieces being deposited in the woods. They fell prey to the chisels of enthusiasts wanting a piece of Lenin's ear or beard. The city decided to prevent further vandalism by covering the stones with earth—twice, in fact, when the problem continued even after the first attempt.

In 2015, the city decided to raise Lenin from the dead (below) and bring his head into this exhibition. Now it is exhibited on its side (bottom), emphasizing its fall from grace and current status not as an item of honor but a fallen relic.

Current Showcase = Immediate Eyecatcher - Museum of European Cultures, Berlin

2/15/2019

Such a simple yet effective idea: an object-of-the-month display at the museum entrance. Here it's the Museum of European Cultures in Berlin, and the object in "Das aktuelle Schaufenster" (the current showcase) is a contemporary Swedish dress used in the celebrations of Saint Lucy. You can see the doors of the main entrance just to the right. What a great way to bring out of storage some objects that may not fit into the other exhibitions, and draw in the visitors as soon as they step over the threshold!

Getting close to the Source - Aedes Architecture Forum, Berlin

1/28/2019

Another beautiful and effective display concept at Aedes Architecture Forum (if less mind-blowing than the subject of the last post) belongs likewise to the show FARAWAY SO CLOSE. A Journey to the Architecture of Kashef Chowdhury / URBANA, Bangladesh. Here the architect Chowdury's drawings, models, and materials (or photos of them) are laid out on drafting tables lit by arm lamps, as if you were looking over his shoulder as he works. It is an intimate way to experience the material, far more so than if it were hung on a wall, let alone pressed behind glass. The openness of the display couldn't directly translate to a bigger venue, where the chance that pieces would go missing is higher, or to an exhibition with originals that would be severely damaged by being touched. But it is such a lovely way to encounter the material on human terms, I wonder if it couldn't be adapted to more venues. Peeking into the artist's studio is, after all, endlessly alluring.

Rising above and Crunching Underfoot - Aedes Architecture Forum, Berlin

1/28/2019

A revelatory multisensory exhibition is on view now at the Aedes Architecture Forum in Berlin. The show FARAWAY SO CLOSE. A Journey to the Architecture of Kashef Chowdhury / URBANA, Bangladesh takes wooden models of the architect Chowdhury's buildings, designed to meet the climatic challenges of Bangladesh, and hangs them from nearly invisible cables. Hovering against the black walls like UFOs highlights the otherworldly nature of the buildings' shapes; it emphasizes the literally out-of-the-box thinking behind the designs. A polygonal snailshell (above right), walls in concentric circles with aligned or offset entrances, or whole islands with central pools engineered to beat the constant floods—these are forms of elevated creativity.

But that's not all! The walls are able to be so dissolvingly black because all the signage and supplementary 2-D materials has been laid on the ground under the corresponding model. You could step on them if you weren't careful. But the thing is, you are careful, because the ground inserts itself constantly into your awareness—through the crushed lava stones covering it. You walk across the room with a glassy crunch-crunch underfoot. It's astonishing how strange this feels in a museum context. To my mind it evokes the natural environment of Bangladesh that is simultaneously Chowdhury's golden muse and his greatest hurdle. This Laufgefühl (sensation of walking) is a marvelous intervention, a way to heighten all the senses together. It definitely deserves more experimentation.

This experience meshed well with the symposium next door on museums in urban space, Extrovert Interior: Publicness and the Contemporary Museum. Asking how the museum mission is being relocated increasingly outside a single building (museum-in-a-box programs for schools, mobile museums on wheels and water, biennials in unexpected venues), the program was a poetic inverse to the exhibition's bringing-gravel-inside idea. All in all a very stimulating day at Aedes, and certainly not the last. I'm already looking forward to their next show, on Archi-Tectonics (Netherlands/New York).

Weave-it-Yourself and Women's Studies - Museum Europäischer Kulturen, Berlin

1/16/2019

Berlin's Museum of European Cultures (Museum Europäischer Kulturen), whose ethnographic collections spread over an impressive range, currently has an exhibition on wool. I was eager to see it primarily because the subject seems a hard sell for the public; how can it be presented in a lively way? Secondly, cloth culture looms large (ha!) in both of my main projects right now. Luxury textiles in the ancient Mediterranean are one touchstone of my book-in-progress; and textile production as a female activity is a current focus of my gender studies research, connected to my role as Women's Representative in two departments.

The exhibition turned out to have several tricks up its sleeve. (The puns just won't stop!) I quite liked the rack of woolen knitwear hung from the ceiling (above) as a way to invigorate the space and use that lofty ceiling. The wall graphic of a thread connecting the exhibition exponents is a good idea, although I admit I only noticed it too late—among other things, it visually links demo videos to otherwise inscrutable woolworking devices which I noodled over a while before realizing that the explanation was just a step away.

My absolute favorite part of the show, however, is the DIY weaving station (above; detail below). This was the perfect way to solidify some knowledge of the weaving process. Hands-on activities are underused educational devices for adults! We all have a bit of kinesthetic learner in us. Using the provided tablets loaded with demo videos of knitting, weaving, crocheting, and embroidering, I got a 1-minute overview of some weaving techniques and tried it out immediately. As you can see (below), my interest was in interweaving two colors of yarn. It's harder than it looks...

This experience was enriching in several ways. I gained new respect for the skill and physical labor involved in weaving, and the fact that women worldwide have been charged with this incredibly taxing and important task for thousands of years. (This podcast episode from Classics Confidential, Weaving Women's Stories, is another fabulous way to gain appreciation for that!) In doing this tiny bit of weaving myself, I also realized how meditative weaving can be, how it keeps the hands and a part of the brain busy while allowing other parts of the brain to wander. The image of Penelope weaving every day takes on new meaning; this woman had a lot of time to think over her life, her husband, her suitors, her island kingdom. Relationships between women could be built up in the time spent spinning wool together, as demonstrated by two Hungarian grandmothers in a video in the exhibition. Suddenly the age-old (patriarchal, need it be said) associations of women spinning and knitting, plotting and gossiping makes more sense. Spinning yarns, embroidering tales—how enlightening!

Pencil-Paper Dioramas - Museumsdorf Düppel, Berlin

12/17/2018

Yesterday I finally made it to Museumsdorf Düppel in Berlin, an open-air museum that has been on my to-do list for years. It centers on an absolutely charming reconstruction of the 12th-century village excavated there primarily in the 1970s. The houses with reed roofs and mud walls are impressive for their craftmanship, as well as the feeling they give you of standing really and truly in a medieval village. The lightly damp, gray, freezing weather enhanced the effect. Hats off to the capable people who made it possible to live in such conditions, constructing surprisingly cozy houses and fashioning their own clothing, tools, candles, food, and on and on. Truly impressive!

As a supplement to the village, the small interpretive center is a gem. "Klein aber fein," small but fine—the description fits perfectly. One of the displays that caught my eye for being both economic and effective is the timeline: a series of small lit vitrines sunk into the wall boasts a series of colors, each vitrine framed by a different hue. These correspond to the colored bands on the timeline above, which stretches from 10,000 BC to the present day. Each vitrine holds a miniature diorama of the landschaft around the village in the indicated time period (a title for the whole wall would help convey this: Changing Landscapes, or some such). I went gaga over the grace of the dioramas—constructed of cardstock cut-outs with simple pencil drawings, they are outrageously simple yet communicative works of art.

What we can achieve! The ideas behind Ancient Objects, Modern Projections

11/28/2018

My presentation on Friday led to a vibrant discussion—the most gratifying possible outcome of a talk! We discussed how displays of ancient art can achieve certain effects together with its visiting audience. Particularly in view of the warm reception it received, I hope that this presentation might spark further ideas in the online community; so here are the slides and talking points to look through as you like. I hope that the conversations will continue to grow and multiply, invigorating our museums and our communities.

(Please enable Javascript in order to view the two PDFs below!)

Ancient Images, Modern Projections. Displaying Complex Narratives in the Museum - this Friday!

11/21/2018

Title slide with reflection of the artist

This Friday is a very special day: I'll be giving a talk about museum displays of ancient art! In particular, how they can benefit from an injection of multivocality, uncertainty, complexity, non-traditional narratives, and other conversation starters. Please come and join the discussion! Complete information about the event is here.

Ancient Images, Modern Projections. Displaying Complex Narratives in the Museum
by Dr. Stephanie Pearson, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and New York University Berlin
on 23 November 2018
at the conference Image studies and museum practice: the image as the focal point of research versus the image as exhibited object. A conference run by the Ancient Objects and Visual Studies programme at the Berlin Graduate School of Ancient Studies
in the Abguss-Sammlung Antiker Plastik der Freien Universität Berlin
Schloßstraße 69b, 14059 Berlin

Rainbow of Responses - Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin

8/25/2018

The feedback room of the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin impressed me with its way of cleanly showcasing visitor responses in multiple languages. In answer to a prompt (how would you define a certain term - values, trade, border, echo), visitors write their responses on paper sheets, some of which, presumably, then get printed onto the big colorful sheets you see on the wall. Emphasizing that the visitors respond in many languages, the museum has hung a copy of the original language beside one translated into English—overlapping, so that they are visually clearly joined.

Dialogues with Collages - Hello World / Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin

8/24/2018

Rauschenberg (Salvage series) speaks Mughal miniature.

For two more days, the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin is showing its critical exhibition Hello World. Divided into "chapters" which all have their own titles and are housed in different arms of the building, the exhibition as a whole addresses one question: What would a collection of contemporary art like the HB's look like if it weren't so Western-focused? Needless to say, particularly with the Humboldt Forum being built not far from here, this topic is urgent. Because I want this blog to continue focusing on design elements (for now, anyway), here I'll just point out a few sources for reading more about the immense debates that this show takes on.

The "chapter" formed around a part of the permanent collection (the Erich Marx Collection, above), titled The Human Rights of the Eye, features the works of Rauschenberg, Warhol, Twombly, and others that don't fit into the exhibition's diversity- and global-oriented themes. To frame them in the terms of Hello World, the curators invited the graphic arts duo cyan to intervene. The artists created collages beside the Marx Collection paintings, each collage reflecting visual aspects as well as content from the painting nearby in order to "trace the multilayered cultural interweavings" in the paintings. I did not feel that this was successful to the point of recasting the collection as "global;" nonetheless, I liked very much the dialogue between modern masterpieces and contemporary collages offering a cloud of associations. I can imagine this format—particularly the large shapes like speech bubbles emerging from the artworks—for all sorts of material relevant to the object, including the usual label information, relevant archival material, or even calendar listings for related events in the museum. Here of course the focus was rather on the collages as art themselves. Still, one collage included archival material in the form of a letter by Rauschenberg about his teacher Albers, which I found philosophically inspiring; see below.

Rauschenberg (Pink Door) speaks archives.

Meathooks for "Fleisch" - Altes Museum, Berlin

6/21/2018

A current special exhibition at the Altes Museum in Berlin called "Fleisch" (Meat) focuses on the cultural significance of meat. Ranging from the religious rites of animal sacrifice to the lustful gaze directed at nude female bodies, the theme is perhaps overstretched; but as an interdepartmental intitiative it is exemplary, and its design is beautiful. The most striking component is industrial-grade rebar lattices painted a fleshy pink, serving as the mount for signage and pictures; these are attached with simple S-hooks reminiscent of meathooks. It's a simple, cost-effective device which here also highlights the theme of the show—very tasteful!

Using Edward Tufte's Visual Explanations in Museum Display

6/15/2018

Paging through Edward Tufte's book Visual Explanations (1997) is instructive not only for graphic designers, but anyone creating—or even reading!—visual displays. In a distinctly personal, engaging voice, Tufte explains what makes effective visual presentations for all sorts of information. He does not feel compelled to hide his disdain for a bad design, and he openly celebrates a good one. One example is the diagram of an ear at the top of the page above. Tufte so loathes the design at left, with its heavy lines almost indistinguishable from the ear itself and its cryptic letter labels, that he compares it to a Renaissance drawing of a man being stuck with swords (below). He juxtaposes the bad design with one he finds preferable, in which the indicator lines are finer than those delineating the ear and the nonsense letters are replaced with the names themselves. The thickness of the lines is highly significant, Tufte points out: one thickness should be used for the drawing of the ear (the object being explained), another for the indicator lines (the metalevel of our knowledge). The two grids at the bottom of the page show this again with two different thicknesses of line used in the background pattern; the diagonal lines overlying them are harder to distinguish in the lefthand example because they are nearly the same thickness as the background lines.

The facing pages shown below illustrate not only Tufte's exasperation at bad design and his acerbic wit at its expense, but also the huge range of applicability of his principles. At left is a painting by Ad Reinhardt, which Tufte uses as another illustration of how subtle differences can have great meaning (here in the shades of blue rendered in three nearly imperceptible vertical bands; Reinhardt wanted to focus the viewer's attention on these simple and subtle differences).

Tufte's book seems to me to have immense potential for designing effective museum displays—again, not just on the level of graphic design. Tufte himself designed an interactive informational screen for visitors to the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. (right); but I mean even more than this. His principles can also be applied in the placement of objects relative to each other, to the text panels, to the space, and so on. His chapter "Parallelism: Repetition and Change, Parallelism and Surprise" illuminates the ways that viewers interpret repeated images. This way of thinking could easily be applied to objects in a gallery.

Art historians, of course, are very accustomed to comparing two objects (a cornerstone of the discipline since Wölfflin), but they do it differently than people who are not trained to look for certain details or to already know certain things about the objects. This can lead to the display of a group of objects which makes art-historical sense but not intuitive, repeated-image-viewing sense. In the Neues Museum in Berlin (below), one room has a timeline written on the wall behind a row of Egyptian sculptures. The intent is to show how humans were portrayed in Egyptian art over time. But the earliest objects happen to be just heads, while the later ones represent entire bodies. The repetition of heads at first, and the subsequent break with this repetition, gives the false impression that what changed around 1600 BC is that the Egyptians started depicting people with bodies. Or perhaps in a different color of stone? Meaningful similarities and differences are hard to notice because of the many other factors at play beyond just the one meant to be highlighted.

A Candid Look at Other Cultures - Interview in the Berliner Zeitung

6/4/2018

Recently the Berliner Zeitung published an interview with me in their series of "Berliner Weltverbesserer" ("Berliners Bettering the World")—a title I can only hope to aspire to! I'm especially proud to be one of the first humanities scholars interviewed for the series. Archaeology can stand up to nanotechnology in bettering the world! That is my view, anyway, as I try to show in this short text about what I find important about my research. The understanding of other cultures is something I try to underscore in my work, since I think it helps us to better understand and respect our modern multicultural world. Greek, Roman, and Egyptian interactions 2000 years ago can tell us a surprising amount about our intercultural interactions today!

Touchable Painting - Berlinische Galerie

3/23/2018

Don't we all want to touch museum objects sometimes? Even as a veteran display analyst and card-carrying art historian, I can sometimes hardly keep my hands to myself. And what about visitors who need to perceive by touch—the blind and sight-impaired? Very slowly, museums are starting to install displays that are accessible to these groups. At the Berlinische Galerie, a recent exhibition of paintings and works on paper used a new technology to make an important painting touchable: the painting was reproduced (3-D printed?) with all its surface textures, and mounted horizontally in a pedestal by a bench in front of the original. In addition, the reproduction was given extra relief in order to make the two female figures stand out from the background; their arms and shoulders were slightly raised, their chins made pointy. Visitors of any sort—sighted or not, with kids or not, art historian or not—can revel in the chance to finally put their hands on a masterpiece!

Wastewater Construction Site = Fun Park Experience - Berlin Mauerpark

3/20/2018

The building of a large drainage pipe under Berlin's Mauerpark is a triumphant example of how simple display concepts can be transformative. Rather than making yet another annoying construction zone in the city, and this one right in at the entrance to the most popular park, the organizers decided to make it an attraction in itself. They achieved this by erecting a wooden wall around the main building area and decorating it with fun and informative panels. The biggest and most iconic is the cartoon cross-section of the pipe itself (above). The pipe introduces itself through a speech bubble: "I'm a drainage pipe with a 4.4-meter diameter"! More detailed panels describe the water system in depth. Around the corner, a spin wheel with exercise challenges on it ("do 5 pushups!" etc.) is a further attraction. Most surprising of all, you can see it all and learn more on a beautiful modern website devoted to the project! Way to go, Berliner Wasserbetriebe.

Disembodied head and Hand - Plaster Cast Collection, Berlin

2/23/2018

The brand new special exhibition at the Plaster Cast Collection in Berlin features this piece, a cast of an ancient sculpture depicting two wrestlers. Just the head of one wrestler and his hand intertwined with the hand of his opponent is preserved. The fragmentary preservation adds to the drama of the piece, as it leaves the modern viewer to decipher what is going on in this tiny excerpt of tumult. The display heightens this even more, with the stark white of the piece brightly lit against its dark pedestal; the effect is a further disembodying of these twisted human parts. The display fits the piece, as the Germans would say, wie die Faust aufs Auge: literally, "like a fist in your eye"— that is, like a glove.

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