A prototype of the First Person Museum opened this month at the Painted Bride Art Center in Philadelphia, and, as a work-in-progress, it achieved some successes and met with a few challenges. Being part of this project makes it difficult to review objectively, especially considering my unresolved concerns about its ideological framework. I will step around those issues to look specifically at one aspect of the exhibition that I came to consider only after my visits to the exhibition.
Before we wrote the captions, we received a list of goals for the exhibit, listed in order of priority. My focus is on the third goal in the list – “Visitors will be able to articulate an emotional response to the stories in the exhibit.” As with any exhibition, emotional responses are elicited on two levels: one response connected to the content of the stories and the exhibition, and another feeling that a visitor gets from the experience as a whole. In my opinion, this second response reflects how confident and clear an exhibition has been in guiding the visitor and in meeting its goals. Confusion or ambivalence on the part of the exiting public is an important indicator of emotional response that reflects on the coherence of the visiting experience as a whole. Despite its successes in other areas, this exhibit fails to elicit the desired response on both of these levels.
The main exhibition space, dotted with lamps and homey furniture, feels inviting and comfortable, if a bit difficult to navigate. The wall plaques, video monitors, and vitrines are neat and professional, giving a planned feel to a project that, because of the budget and location, otherwise might feel scrappy or temporary. Video and audio pieces that accompany some of the objects provide stories and context that reveal the real heart of the First Person Arts initiative, connecting visitors to participants through memoir and documentary. These elements help to anchor the exhibition in the personal.
Nevertheless, the exhibition is beset by one overriding challenge: a lack of clarity in the exhibition narrative. Visitors to the museum may feel themselves pulled in different directions, moved one way by the stories and another by the photographs, their experience corporatized and branded through terms like “StoryCircle” and design and text that echoes ad copy, but pushing to be individualized through the second-person “you.” I felt nudged toward an imperative to connect but inadequately guided to a relationship with the pieces on display. In the end, the exhibition feels designed by committee, lacking in a sense of a singular, unifying sensibility – a museum by and for me, you, we, them … who?
One of the first things I noticed about the show was the content of the stories. It seems that most of the stories hinge not on memories, but on the process of remembering. In many cases, the objects connected their owners not to a story, but to a different time in their lives. One participant remembered fishing with his grandfather over the course of many months or years. Another participant remembered the period of time when her baby daughter could fit into her first clothes. Another story talked about many family meals cooked in one specific pot. What I noticed most about many of these stories is that they lack the type of details that bring a narrative alive, those personalizing facts and embellishments that distinguish the voice of the teller, root the narrative in a time and a place, reveal the teller’s self to the listener, and connect people in and across communities. Specifics lead audience members to generalize about their own lives, but generalizations don’t lead them to generate specifics. Many of these stories left me feeling that my emotions were expected to develop on the basis of thinly developed universals: “having a baby,” “losing a parent/friend/culture,” “the pain of separation/divorce,” “nostalgia for the past.” I desperately wanted personal details – a true “first person” revelation – to guide me into feeling.
Objects that included no audio or video were most severely debilitated in this regard. Some of the audio and video stories, such as Renee’s story of her boxers, started to dig deeper into specifics, which helps to develop a sense of empathy in the audience. Still, even some of the best stories could have mined experiences and details further below the surface. The introductory wall text – heavy on the second person voice – promises to connect me, the viewer, with these stories and with stories of my own. But the text, audio, and video failed to take the risks necessary to form real relationships, between audience and storyteller, but also between storyteller and object, and between object and audience. Having gotten a nice introduction to these stories, I was left with a lot of questions, mainly about emotional content and the role of the object in the story itself. What does it feel like to connect with a father only after he has died? What is the depth of grief at the loss of a friend who was only 33 years old? What questions does a mother ask of herself or her society when her young son is sent to prison? And why are these stories so sad? Where is the humor, the nerviness, embarrassment, elation, fear, stubbornness, joy, or anger? Couple this one-note emotion of melancholy nostalgia with the staged photographs of smiling participants – in the style of a magazine spread – and I’m confused about what to feel. In the end, the museum experience, on the level of personal narrative, suffers not only from a lack of depth but also of breadth.
On the level of the individual narrative, I think the problems are easily corrected. Storytelling does not come naturally to most people, but the skill can be taught, or stories can be interpreted by professionals (as in the audio and video – both of which were culled from interviews and edited to communicate “story” effectively). More time and space needs to be dedicated to developing the narratives attached to each of the objects. One thing the exhibit succeeded in proving is that everyone does have a story. I think the museum can work with participants to make sure these stories mine the rich detail of the tellers’ lives, and then give them ample wall space for text as well as audio and video to present stories more fully.
On the level of the exhibition narrative, the problems may be more difficult to resolve. As a committee endeavor, the project bears some of the signs of too many cooks in the kitchen. My class contributed to this overrepresentation of voices as writers and researchers. With eighteen different captions with different points of view, different writing and conceptual styles, and different names on each placard, it was hard to get a unified message from these histories.
The First Person Museum received a $75,000 grant from The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage through the Heritage Philadelphia Program and a $75,000 grant from the Engage 2020 Innovation Grants Program. It’s worth pointing out that the programs seem to have a very narrow overlap, which may have contributed to what amounts to two more cooks in the kitchen. Heritage Philadelphia seems interested in pushing the envelope of how social history can connect and Engage 2020 seems to be encouraging restraint to appeal to large numbers of potential consumers. Although the goals of these two organizations are more similar than different, reading their mission statements and public materials (via their websites) induced a bit of a push-pull reaction in me. I suspect that this came to bear on the design of the First Person Museum, resulting in a show that wanted to do right by its participants, its paid staff, its consultants, and its granting organizations.
Ultimately, the First Person Museum suffers from its abundance of voices – the first-person “I” who tells the story, the second-person “you” who can tell your story, too, and the inevitable development of the third-person “he/she/it,” as people, their stories, and their possessions are objectified and turned into consumable narratives. If the other voices – those of the designers and directors – can be unified and clarified, I, you, and the rest might find ourselves blended in an exhibition narrative that successfully involves us all.
