A Year of "Shoveling"

The Museum of Contemporary Art of Chicago

Recently, I visited the Museum of Contemporary Art of Chicago for an exhibit, The Way of Shovel: Art as Archaeology. The show offers various artists’ creative takes and appropriations on subject of archaeology. The exhibit peaks my interest because of the concept of crossover of art, archaeology, and educational inquiry. It includes audio recordings of our own curator at the Oriental Institute, where I currently work, discussing interpretations of the “real” archaeologist on the selected topics brought up in the exhibit. What was most fascinating to me is how contemporary artists have taken archaeology as a metaphor and method of inquiry on issues relating to philosophy, politics, and activism. At the beginning of 2014, I want to use this exhibit to reflect upon what I have learned from the field of archaeology as a museum educator in the past year.

The earlier stages of the archeological process involve pre-field investigation, survey, and excavation. In The Way of Shovel exhibit, one of the artists, Derek Brunen, created a three-part installation, Plot (Tombstone 2013), which was presented in video, showing the artist digging his own grave in a cemetery located in his hometown. The artist uses the tool – the shovel – as a metaphor in engaging greater philosophical questions about the meaning of life, death, labor, fate, and the relationship between self and the world. When seeing the video of the artist’s performative, repetitive, and meditative movements of digging, I thought of it as a manifestation of life as a perpetual process of learning and making connection with our world. We learn through questioning, doing,  and digging deeper, then repeating this.

Michael Rakowitz, The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist, 2013.
The Museum of Contemporary Art.

 

In the other room, Michael Rakowitz’s The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist is a collection of re-created sculptural statues made of Middle Eastern product packaging materials. These objects represent the lost artifacts due to the US-Iraq war in 2003. The artist’s work delivers ironies through the idea of opposites – through the playfulness of the images of the materials used, it reinforces the seriousness of the political-diplomatic issues that were being dealt with; and through the use of modern packaging materials on the objects, it also reminded me of the vulnerability of the world ancient cultural heritage in light of warfare.

In 2013, I had written two posts relating my exploration of archaeology: From Art to Archaeology and  Encountering a Mover-Shaker: Gertrude Bell. In this new year, I look forward to sharing more on my journey exploring the archaeology – perhaps like the archaeologists exploring and excavating their field, and maybe like the artists “shoveling” our history. As a museum educator, our museum collection will be my fieldwork where I can discover ways to engage our audience such as families, students, teachers, and the public, and help facilitate your inquiries about our history.

From Art to Archaeology

Funerary statuettes from the tomb of Nykauinpu from Giza (ca. 2477 B.C.). Oriental Institute Museum.

Learning is lifelong, and the learning of archaeology for me as a person who comes from the arts is a monumental step not only in my career, but also the way I connect with my own cultural roots and greater human history. The past six months since I began my new role at the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago as a museum educator has been an astonishing journey in exploring the ancient world and human’s unending creativity throughout history.

In recalling my first encounter of archaeology, it happened during my family trip to Xi’An in my high school years. I remember the visit to the Terra-Cotta Warrior Burial, a massive tomb with more than 8,000 life-size clay figures of armies and chariots that the first emperor of Chines built so lavishly for protection in his afterlife. It was a mind-blowing experience. There I learned that a discovery of fragments of a clay figure was made by a group of peasants in the 1970s as they were digging a well which led to one of the greatest archaeological discoveries of modern world history. The Museum of the Terracotta Army, a four-acre underground pit, has been opened around the discovery site since 1979 to the public.

The magnitude of the collection of the 2,000 year-ago artifacts in this Burial still stun me today even so many years after the trip. Each one was crafted with distinguished stylistic postural expression and unique features on its armors. Archaeology and the history unearthed through the artifacts open up a door for us to learn about the stories and myths of ancient life.

I have come to a place where I circled back to archaeology after a voyage in teaching. Six months into my new role at the Oriental Institute, I have the privilege to get much closer to the study of the ancient world. The Oriental Institute is an interdisciplinary research center and the museum exists to promote understanding of the development and functioning of the ancient civilizations of the Near East by conducting archaeological excavations, systematic stewardship of museum collections of artifacts, philological studies, historical research, and the development of dictionaries of ancient languages in the Near East.

Tracing the origins of objects excavated, discovering stories about life in the past, and making connections between then and now in the field of archaeology as well as having the opportunity of being in a place like the Oriental Institute grants me a completely new lens of looking at and deciphering ancient cultures. I have come to see the profound relationships between the artifacts and their contexts in forming our knowledge about the past are interwoven – across times, people, things they make, and the environments in which they live.

Her Blog: Nina Simon's Museum 2.0

The Participatory Museum (2010), by Nina Simon.

After I finished graduate study in art education, I started out as a college instructor. A topic that I included most often in my class was the idea of museum as a site of civic and cross-cultural exchanges. In my last semester before I left for a new position at the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago, I experimented integrating blogging in my class and engaged my students in using it as a way to practice community engagement. Their work was recorded in collaboration on Arts & Community Development blog. Throughout the class, a book that we referenced to on museum pedagogy was The Participatory Museum, by Nina Simon.

Nina Simon is museum leader who takes blogging into a space of innovation for the museum world. Described as “museum visionary” by the Smithsonian Magazine, Nina has a strong and clear vision of how to bridge the blog and museum together. Her book, The Participatory Museum, was fueled by the collection of posts on her blog, Museum 2.0. She sees the technology and web-driven society we are living in as an opportunity to optimize individuals’ learning in visiting museums. Seven years ago, Nina started the Museum 2.0 blog to explore the ways that the philosophies and directions of Web 2.0 -- which removes the authority from the content producer and put it in the users’ hands, allowing the users to be more engaged in their learning through the exhibit. 

Carol: When did you start writing online? And how did you start? 
 
Nina: Fall of 2006. I had attended a conference (Association of Science and Technology Centers) and was just blown away by some of the intriguing things I was hearing from brilliant people in the field who I was much too shy to approach. Blogging gave me a way to explore what I had heard and start to build a community dialogue in a safe and creative way.


Carol: Why is it important to you? How has the practice of writing online influenced you? 
 

Nina Simon

Nina: I learn from writing. The process of it – the research, the thinking it out, the writing it down – all leads me to discover things I didn't realize. The transparency of online writing both energizes me and pushes me to keep doing it. I know there is an audience out there that doesn't care if I'm exhausted or stressed or on vacation. They expect a post every week, and I want to deliver. And when I was writing The Participatory Museum online using a wiki, the open format allowed readers to help significantly sculpt the final text both in content and style.

Also, as I've gotten more busy at work, blogging has remained an important point of reflection and sharing in my week that would be easy to neglect otherwise.

Carol: What do you aim to achieve through your own blog?
 
Nina: Mostly to learn aloud, to share ideas, and to force myself to honor the need for reflective practice in my own work.

Carol: Any other blogs (particularly those by women) that have influence on you?

Nina: When I first started blogging, my absolute favorite blog was Creating Passionate Users by Kathy Sierra. Unfortunately, she closed down her blog in 2007 due to misogynistic threats she received from trolls online. I still learn from going back to Kathy's posts, and I sincerely hope that we are moving beyond the kind of hate speech that ended her blogging.