Museum as Process

CAROL S. JEFFERS

Introduction

Today’s art museums are committed to completing major expansion and

renovation projects, and vigorously carrying out their stated missions.1
These missions typically are concerned with processes of acquisition, pres-
ervation, exhibition, and education. The National Gallery of Art, for ex-
ample, is dedicated to “preserving, collecting, exhibiting, and fostering the
understanding of works of art.”2 Similarly, the Getty Museum at the J. Paul
Getty Center seeks to “delight, inspire, and educate the public by acquir-
ing, conserving, studying, exhibiting, and interpreting works of art.”3 Such
processes are strategic, of course, and give direction and purpose to the
range of programs and services offered by these institutions. Ensuring that
visitors are surrounded by works of art, “at the highest quality,” these pro-
cesses also give rise to a particular view of the museum as an “object of re-
flection, contemplation, and discussion.”4
Although unstated, I shall argue that art museums typically have other
missions that are actively, if insidiously implemented through processes of
representation (re-presentation), socialization, institutionalization, and com-
modification. The museum functions as a “socializing institution,” that both
represents and presents cultural assumptions, as well as social and aesthetic
values to young and old alike.5 These processes succeed in establishing an
“ideology of aesthetic autonomy — the compartmental conception of fine
art that segregates it to the separate realm of the museum.”6 Simultaneously,
they present “ideology in material form.”7 The museum itself is a represen-
tation that tends to take on an independent and ultimately self-reflecting
existence. In a Debordian view, “it is a spectacle, which, in its generality, is
a concrete inversion of life, and as such, the autonomous movement of

Carol S. Jeffers is Professor of Art Education at California State University, Los Ange-
les. Recently her articles have appeared in Art Education, Studies in Art Education, and
Journal of Arts and Learning Research. She has also authored chapters in several books.

Journal of Aesthetic Education, Vol. 37, No. 1, Spring 2003

©2003 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
108 Carol S. Jeffers

non-life.”8 Through processes of representation and commodification, the

spectacular museum is constructed as a frame that influences the public
perception of art and society. Moreover, this ideological frame influences
how the public experiences constructs of time and place, and how it comes
to know about art in relation to the real world.
Today’s thriving art museums — and the various processes that deliver
both their overt and covert missions — are likely to have a greater impact
on society than ever before. With such potential, it seems especially impor-
tant at this juncture to examine critically the art museum as process; to
deconstruct that which has been “constructed as a symbol in Western soci-
ety since the Renaissance.”9 In undertaking such an examination, then, the
first task is to describe current museum impact on the public. Of special
concern are questions about what the museum represents to its visitors,
particularly to young students and teachers, and how these representations
shape constructions of knowledge, conceptions of art, and roles for visitors
and artists. Contemporary representations themselves raise questions about
the historical context in which they originated, developed, and were carried
forward. As a second task, then, this essay will present a historical-critical
analysis that integrates several theoretical perspectives on the origins, de-
velopment, and implications of the Western museum and its various pro-
cesses. Next, I will consider the possibility and implications of visitor impact
on museum processes. This last section includes examples of alternative
museum approaches whose mission is implemented through active visitor
participation in processes of conversation and community.

Collecting and Exhibiting: The Museum as Sacred Grove

The museum as a symbol in Western society is apparently recognized and

understood as such, even by its youngest members. Children in the United
States, Canada, and France, for example, can offer definitions of an art or
other museum, and know how to “act and react” within one, even though
they may have had extremely limited or no prior museum experiences.10 To these
children, a museum is a venerable, quiet place, “like the library.”11 When
asked, “what is a museum?” children typically respond with: “a place to
collect things,” or “a big place where lots of people go” to see “old stuff”
and “lots of pictures.”12 In general, children seem to view museums as sites
for exposition, and as repositories for preserving valuable or unusual ob-
jects of the past, as for example, this eight-year-old in Los Angeles, who
said: “Museums are where preserved mummies and stuffed animals are
kept; they show stuff from the past and from the future so people who have
never seen a bald eagle can come and see one or other stuffed animals.”13
Despite their tender years and lack of museum experience, these children’s
views are clear and strongly reflect the preservation, exhibition, and collection
 Museum as Process 109

missions of the museum. In fact, about half of the children in the interna-
tional study conducted by Anna Kindler and Bernard Darras defined the
museum in terms of its overt mission to exhibit works of art and the other
half did so in terms of its mission to collect art and other objects.
Older children, as well as adults, often share these views of museum as
site for exposition and as repository. Moreover, they express their apprecia-
tion that museums exhibit a rich variety of rare and valuable objects. Some
students, as well as pre- and in-service teachers embrace art museums as
“unique educational environments,” but most experience them as “sacred
groves.”14 Typical is this in-service elementary teacher, who, upon visiting
the Norton Simon Museum of Art with her seven-year old nephew, said:
“We wanted to enjoy the timeless beauty of classical artwork in a lovely,
relaxing environment.”15 While it seems clear that the idyllic environment
of the sacred grove succeeds in promoting “reflection, contemplation, and
discussion,” its success in “fostering the understanding of art” — the educa-
tional mission — is much less clear. Instead, the museum, as sacred grove,
takes on an independent and self-reflecting existence that shapes visitor
expectations and behavior. To communities of students and teachers, it
represents itself clearly as “a symbol of lasting value” and not as a site of
independent inquiry or repository of ideas.16
Museum impact of this sort also has an epistemological impact. Knowl-
edge of the “symbol of lasting value” is readily available to the Western
community — including its youngest and least experienced or interested
members — through a public body of knowledge that has been under con-
tinuous construction for centuries. Construction of museum knowledge, or
knowledge of what the museum represents, appears to depend less on the
cognitive or psychological development of the individual and more on the
rules, codes, and norms established by the social processes and partisan in-
terests of a particularly influential group within the Western community.
These rules and codes, originally established by and serving the interests of
wealthy eighteenth-century European patrons, are crucial as they deter-
mine what counts as knowledge. That is, they determine both how and
what the contemporary community can know about the museum and its
processes of representation and socialization. Moreover, the public commu-
nity learns that rule-making processes and privileges are controlled to this
day by a powerful minority and its private interests. Through the socializa-
tion process, then, the community knows what to expect of and how to be-
have in the sacred grove. As if on an annual pilgrimage, the public makes
its way from entrance to exit, speaking only in hushed tones and pausing
for one minute on average before each display.17
As the museum directs behavior and the construction of social knowl-
edge, so, too, it directs the development of the discipline (public knowl-
edge) of art, as well as the Western aesthetic attitude. The museum does so
110 Carol S. Jeffers

by establishing what Richard Shusterman calls a specialized “cultural sphere”

that distances art from daily living and differentiates it from more popular
forms of culture (CB, 252). In its separate sphere, “art becomes defined by
the aesthetic attitude — that is, by the idea of a disinterested, distanced, for-
mal contemplation of the world and of the work” (CB, 252). Imprisoned in
its “exalted cloister,” art becomes a spectacle in the Debordian sense (CB,
248). The implication, according to Shusterman, is a “hidden elitism” (CB,
252). As Shusterman continues, “only certain people can take a disinter-
ested, formal perspective and they are people whose practical world is al-
ready well taken care of. Their well-being is secure, so they are free to devote
leisure time and energy to the more demanding pleasures of pure form”
(CB, 252). Contemplation of a spectacular work of art within the sacred
grove, then, is not a benign act. Nor is it an innocent one. It invokes the elit-
ist aesthetic attitude, which, “for all its purity…implies a sort of social and
intellectual distinction and even serves as a marker of such distinction” (CB,
252).

Compartmentalizing and Commodifying: Origins of the Museum as

Spectacle

As mentioned above, the museum was constructed as a sacred grove in the

eighteenth century. At that time, wealthy private collectors and later, the
“imperial” nations of Europe, began possessing and presenting the exotic
and valuable objects of their conquests and in turn, demonstrating their ac-
cumulated wealth and extent of their international influence to the curious,
awed, and gawking public. The Museum of Napoleon at the Louvre, for ex-
ample, presented the “bounty of conquests” and found itself adding more
and more galleries to accommodate the mounting material being shipped to
Paris following various battles and military campaigns.18
Once it began to develop, the Louvre and its expanding space was expe-
rienced as place, in the sense that the museum took on its own identity, an
aura, and was endowed with cultural and social values.19 As places, muse-
ums such as the Louvre provide a sense of stability and security that also is
conferred upon their imperial collections and prized objects. Representa-
tions of stability and security, then, are conflated with socio-aesthetic val-
ues and cultural assumptions about permanence, worth, legitimacy, and
quality. The implication is that the prized possessions inside the secure and
stable museum are more enduring, valuable, legitimate, and of higher qual-
ity than those outside it. The construction of museum as place (and all that
it implies), is insidious and, unfortunately, not often questioned or un-
packed. Nancy R. Johnson, for example, found art museum docents who
were presenting the “limiting notion” that “costly and rare objects belong-
ing to wealthy or privileged persons tend to make up the art in museums
 Museum as Process 111

and are to be considered as having aesthetic value.”20 Touring school groups

are left with the impression, albeit historically valid, that “the material cul-
ture existing outside the museum or the abodes of the elite is neither artistic
nor of high aesthetic value”21
Early practices of collecting, or some might say “pillaging,” served to
build European museums whose collections were considered impressive
both in size and kind. “Only in imperial nations in Europe and North
America,” writes George Hein, “can one find large international collections
of paintings and natural history objects” which are clearly distinguished
from the national collections of museums in China or Greece, for example.22
Aside from raising moral issues well after the fact, these European practices
served ideological interests first and foremost; they laid planks in “the
foundation of thought in a class society within the conflicted course of his-
tory.”23 And they built an ideological frame through which the European
community, in particular, saw itself and thought about its position in the
world.
Imperial collecting practices, moreover, spurred an increase in what
Yi-Fu Tuan refers to as “the prestige in disciplined curiosity” and reflected
a growing fascination among Europeans with the past, with the idea of de-
velopment, and memory (SP, 153). Europeans began to ponder questions
about the age of the earth, the human life-span, and antecedents to observ-
able forms in nature. Among European philosophers, the phenomenon of
memory gained in importance. To remember, they said, was to escape the
purely momentary sensations, thereby avoiding “the nothingness that lay
in wait…between moments of existence” (Georges Poulet cited in SP, 194).
The museum, as a sacred grove, provided such an escape. It represented se-
curity by presenting tangible evidence of the past. Museum collections,
moreover, stimulated the collective memory, as well as a new conscious-
ness of marking stages in the development of European history and culture.
Such an interest in cultural and historical development became apparent
in the United States shortly after the American Revolution. By 1804, histori-
cal societies had been founded in Boston and New York, with others soon to
follow. The purpose of these historical societies, according to Tuan was to
collect and preserve “documents” (including three-dimensional ones con-
sisting of crafts, tools, and furniture) that would tell a part of the American
story. What this story meant depended on how people of the young repub-
lic perceived and attempted to master growth, development, and changing
times. Generally, when a people feels in control of its destiny, it establishes
museums to preserve materials that mark the stages of “confident growth
and point to the future” (SP, 195). When, on the other hand, a people feels
that change is occurring too rapidly, spinning out of control, it establishes
museums that celebrate an idyllic and nostalgic past.
112 Carol S. Jeffers

In the United States, there has been a proliferation of museums that ful-
fill each of these functions; interestingly enough, art museums often do
both, pointing to a dynamic future and looking back to an idyllic past. For
example, the directors and curators both at the National Gallery of Art and
the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), perhaps in anticipation
of a nervous and nostalgic public at the end of the last millennium, may
have presented the spectacular exhibition, “Van Gogh’s Van Goghs,” while
also exhibiting the work of contemporary artists such as Eleanor Antin. The
Van Gogh exhibit was a smashing success for both institutions, attracting
huge crowds — a record of 850,000 at LACMA. In the fall of 1999, LACMA
followed up with “Around Impressionism: French Paintings of the National
Gallery,” another hugely popular and nostalgic exhibition.
As interest in the past has grown, so too, has interest in collecting, classi-
fying, or in a Debordian view, commodifying, both the odd and the old, the
nostalgic and the new. Early on, a classification system was needed and de-
veloped. “To the Western mind,” writes Tuan, “the simplest taxonomy called
for the coordinates of time and place” (SP, 194). In this taxonomy, time is
viewed as linear and progressive, not elliptical and continuous, as in non-
Western societies. It is characterized not as a “succession of noble and ig-
noble deeds and natural and supernatural events,” but rather, by changing
periods of technology, fashion, and cultural customs and values (SP, 193).
Western time measures the periods of growth, prosperity, war, and con-
quest. Established during such periods, the museum itself continues to con-
struct time as linear and progressive by classifying and exhibiting its collec-
tions according to a Western chronology, and not by another means, such
as narrative content or thematic meaning.
In the Western taxonomy, place refers only to a “habit of mind,” and not
to a “state of rootedness” (SP, 154). To be rooted in a place, Tuan notes, a
people must have more than a sense of place; a people must feel at home in
a particular locality that it considers sacred, inviolable, and ancestral. In this
view, Western people, past and present, are not rooted, and consequently,
tend not to experience place as inviolable. In tearing magnificent sculptures
out of their sacred place in Athens, for example, Lord Elgin (1766-1841) vio-
lated nothing. Reflecting the Western habit of mind, he simply moved them
from one place to another. The British Museum also reflected this view
when using the taxonomy of Western time and place to label and present
these pieces as rootless objects, its commodities. In Debord’s society of the
spectacle, however, this taxonomy would evolve into one based on the eco-
nomic value of these commodities. The British Museum, then would clas-
sify and label these pieces according to their worth, as determined by their
insured value and their estimated value at auction. Replacing the wall text
would be the price tag, which effectively would provide the public with
pertinent information about the Elgin commodities.
 Museum as Process 113

Museums of the Western industrialized world consist wholly of dis-

placed, decontextualized objects that have been recontextualized as com-
modities. Thus, they serve to “generate didactic illusions” (SP, 195). These
illusions, or spectacles, raise questions about “the appearance of reality and
the reality of appearance.”24 Through their illusions and appearances, mu-
seums represent certain sociocultural values and became a part of what
Gablik refers to as “modern aesthetic structure,” with its “vision-centered
concepts, its passive, spectatorial orientation” (CB, 16). During “walk-and-
gawk tours,” museum visitors are spectators and consumers who gaze
upon spectacular works of art with a disembodied eye and are confronted
by the cultural authority, discourse, and spectacle of the museum — quite
literally, a “modern aesthetic structure.”25
This structure, like the museum itself, is built upon traditional Western
theories of knowledge and aesthetics, whose primary focus is upon the in-
dividual “knower as perceiver.” Traditionalists tend not to focus on how
the human community perceives the world and constructs knowledge about
it. In theories of the individual, “conception and perception re-arm each
other in the process of converting subjective into objective thought.”26 John
Dewey has called this the “spectator theory of knowledge” a defining feature
of rational and realist traditional epistemologies.27
For the skeptic, the epistemological problem with these mind-world du-
alistic theories lies in the external world. How is knowledge of the museum,
its exhibits, texts, and values possible, when, according to Descartes, the
only certain knowledge is of the visitor’s inner, personal world of ideas and
sensations? “How is it possible,” asks Liu, “to lift the ‘veil of ideas’ that
separates the world as it appears to us from the world as it really is?”28
Debord has resolved this theoretical problem by asserting that the world
consists only of appearances — it is a spectacle, “knowledge that is made or
‘produced’ into an object of passive contemplation.”29 In this view, both the
individual and the community contemplate the spectacle. Private and pub-
lic knowledge of the blockbuster show, “Around Impressionism,” say, is
produced into an object of passive contemplation. The significance here is
that these objectified artworks prescribe the relationship that can exist be-
tween them and the public. Debord continues the thought: “The spectacle
now corresponds to the historical moment at which the commodity com-
pletes its colonization of social life. It is not just that the relationship to com-
modities is now plain to see — commodities are now all that there is to
see.”30 Such a view, albeit dour, may explain why nine to 12-year-old visi-
tors to the Getty Museum prefer to spend all of their time alone using the
museum’s computer terminals, staring at and manipulating computer im-
ages of the original artworks, rather than observing them directly in the
nearby galleries. To these youngsters, there are no questions about reality
and appearance; the virtual and the original are regarded as spectacles. On
114 Carol S. Jeffers

the screen or on the wall, what’s the difference? They are all commodities,
objectifications, and clearly, packaged knowledge that prescribe the young
consumer’s passive relationship with them.
Perhaps sharing Debord’s views, many contemporary artists are creat-
ing a kind of postmodern “Pop Art” as a critique of a media-driven con-
sumer society whose social life is completely colonized by the commodity.
Art that reflects and comments on contemporary culture becomes quite
problematic, however, when viewed within the institution it critiques. As
part of a collection or exhibition, art with a “consumerist focus” is itself co-
opted by the very process of commodification it strives to critique. Its politi-
cal message is depoliticized; its meaning “evaporated by a system of collec-
tors and museums vying for power to be obtained through the possession
of those art objects” (Mary Jane Jacob cited in CB, 296). This irony is not lost
on Jacob, formerly the chief curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art in
Los Angeles. Extremely uncomfortable with “what happens to this art when it
goes into the museum....what happens within that process of institutional-
ization” (CB, 297), Jacob resigned her prestigious position, noting that the
“critical edge of what the artist was doing is diffused through the great
seduction of success in the established art world” (CB, 298).
What “happens” to the art also “happens” to the contemporary artists
who create it. The museum and its processes of commodification and insti-
tutionalization, indeed, have a dramatic impact on these artists. As Jacob
puts it: “the artist becomes a product within the institution, rather than a
driving force; the artist does not get integrated into the institution as a
thinker. The artist functions as somebody whose objects are consumed,
appropriated, purchased, preserved” (CB, 303-4). Moreover, artists them-
selves are commodified and consumed by museum trustees who, according
to Jacob, are especially interested in exhibiting the work of “art stars,” like
Cindy Sherman, Barbara Kruger, and Mike Kelly. Excited only by these big
names, the trustees obviously do not read the art as a critique of culture,
which as Jacob points out, is a critique of the trustees and their institution.
In the case of contemporary art and artists, then, the museum has an im-
pact that, for its neutralizing effect, is particularly devastating. Historically
as well, museum impact on collected works is profound, imbuing them
with the socioeconomic values and cultural authority of a consumer ideol-
ogy. Both historic and contemporary works become spectacles, which in
turn, have a potent and palpable impact on the public: how it comes to
know about art isolated in the cultural sphere; how it develops a distinctive
aesthetic attitude; and how it experiences the museum (as cloister, spec-
tacle), and what this re-presents to the public. If museum impact is to be
addressed, then attention must be paid to its pernicious effects and changes
must be made. Moreover, if the public is to have any impact on the mu-
seum, then some alternatives must be offered. Such changes might involve
 Museum as Process 115

reconceptualizing the museum, for example, as a free and open space in which
diverse groups construct public and personal knowledge through processes
of conversation and community. In this alternative, the public actively
establishes and fulfills a new kind of educational mission as its museum.

Conversation and Community: Alternative Museum Processes

In an alternative view, the museum is no longer a physical place, but rather,

a metaphorical space in which the human community is free to explore and
reconnect with art as a part of daily living. Bricks and mortar are not impor-
tant. To undertake the costly expansion and remodeling projects planned
by a number of existing art museums in various U.S. cities is not, after all, to
create the space available for exploring the possibility of what Gablik calls a
“connective aesthetics.” Such an aesthetics, for Gablik, is “based in vigor-
ously active and impassioned engagement that would restore art’s connect-
edness with the world after a century of vision-oriented, purist ideals” (CB,
17). In the Los Angeles area, for example, the terrace at LACMA or the Rob-
ert Irwin garden at the Getty Center may provide the space in which to ex-
plore a connective aesthetics. Moreover, diverse groups might create their
own space, for example, by riding the Red or Blue Lines and discussing the
commissioned artworks of the various subway stations in Los Angeles
County, or even by cruising along Mulholland Drive, subject of the David
Hockney painting of the same name. What is needed is the free and open
space that allows for people to construct and contextualize meanings about
art through the community-building process of dialogue.
As an independent curator, Jacob currently works outside the traditional
museum to create such spaces. For Jacob, these are vital spaces, where the
same art outside can “have a different life” from the one it could have in-
side the museum. Moreover, the art Jacob finds “most vital” does not “philo-
sophically or physically fit within the museum” (CB, 304). In recent years,
Jacob has curated outdoor projects in Chicago and Charleston, South Caro-
lina in order to “integrate art into a process of living” (CB, 310). “Places in
the Past,” for example, brought African-American artists to Charleston
where they and the citizens explored the city’s heritage as the former capi-
tal of slavery in North America. This project, a part of the Spoleto Festival,
resulted in an outdoor exhibition of a series of site-specific installations that
were developed in dialogue with the artists and Jacob, as the curator. In
Chicago, Jacob sees her work with “Culture in Action” as a program involv-
ing a variety of collaborative projects occurring in multiple spaces and
phases across time. Rooted in the community, these provocative art spaces
— vacant lots, an abandoned rowhouse — engage the public, not only in
dialogue about the piece to be created, but also in its actual creation.
116 Carol S. Jeffers

Happily, the possibility of creating a space for an alternative museum

inside the traditional museum does exist — provided that this is a dialogi-
cal space in which dynamic processes of making meaning and building re-
lationships are facilitated in community. Such processes, which promote
the movement of ideas and discourse among diverse community members,
must flow from a constructivist epistemology that usually arises out of a
pragmatist philosophy. Indeed, this alternative museum requires an “epis-
temological break” with the modernist “paradigm of vision” as the basis for
artistic and social practice (CB, 16). It rejects concepts of the autonomous
and isolated self, the lone, struggling artist, and “individualistic ontology,”
which, according to Gablik have been the “silent faith” of art and which
have epitomized the gawk and gaze of the “spectator theory of knowledge”
(CB, 16).
Instead, the alternative museum and its epistemology are concerned with
the construction of knowledge within a group context — that is, with how
people construct a personal world from “a labyrinth of potential connec-
tions” and seek to understand the relationship between their constructions
and those of others.31 Engaging in connective and dialogical practices, the
group utilizes the dialectical powers of art to build community through
what Gablik calls “empathic social interaction” (CB, 17). In an open space,
perhaps a “labyrinth,” the group strives to build community, even as it
builds a museum within the museum.
A museum based on community discourse is itself an idea that develops
out of a Deweyan-Peircian theory in which ideas are assigned a key role as
carriers of discursive and nondiscursive meaning. In this theory, the trouble-
some dualities that separate subjective-objective thought, mind-world rela-
tions, and visitor-museum processes come together, as Dewey writes, “in a
functional unity,” connected by a process of “mutual adjustment.”32 Ideas
allow for transformative and informative relationships, and are “amenable
to social construction.”33 “They can connect with [art] objects and events,
illuminate facts and also, be illuminated by them; they allow for dialogue
between people and for transactions between people and [art ] objects and
events.”34 Socially authored and individually checked, ideas travel and are
illuminated in the interactive space between the members of the dialectical
community and the art that is the focus of the discourse.
In the epistemological space that defines the alternative museum, both
personal (private) knowledge and public knowledge are constructed. Each
is contextual and must be understood as the product of group discourse.
Indeed, the contextual nature of knowledge — aesthetic, social, political —
is a function of the contextual nature of discourse. Knowing and learning
are not conceived of as “individual acts of discovery,” but as “communal
acts of creation.”35 Lone individuals neither determine nor legitimize what
counts as knowledge; rather, these are community functions, which also
 Museum as Process 117

serve to guard against relativism. Knowledge claims, including aesthetic

judgments, are “continually tested and contested” in the context of commu-
nity discourse.36 This means that the group’s aesthetic judgment counts as
knowledge and not merely as opinion — but only if the world is under-
stood as being comprised of human relationships, rather than of isolated in-
dividuals — that is, “a world that coheres through human connection
rather than through systems of rules.”37
The functional relationship among knowledge, discourse, and commu-
nity now becomes apparent. Putting it succinctly, Liu writes: “knowing and
learning are not possible without discourse and discourse is not possible
without community.”38 Community, in this sense, emerges from this episte-
mology as a “pedagogical virtue,” and “precondition to learning.”39 For
learning to occur within this community, however, listening must take on
an importance equal to, if not greater than that of seeing. To construct
meanings about art is for the community to engage in critical and empathic
listening. The listening community also must be a diverse one in which a
spectrum of voices can speak and be heard. Different perspectives, interpre-
tations, and criticisms must be shared and creative conflicts (that lead to
new discourse and new knowledge) must be engendered. Through these
activities, the diverse community will succeed, both in facilitating learning
and in protecting against group orthodoxy and dogmatism.
Moreover, this community must be active and engaged. Engagement is
understood as developing and exploring the relations between the con-
cepts, activities, persons, and institutions that are separated in a Cartesian
epistemology. The engaged community is able to overcome the dualisms of
object-subject, theory-practice, knowing-doing, and art-real world. In an en-
gaged community, diverse members have shifted their “ideal of knowledge
as correspondence between mind and form to a conception of knowing as a
process of human relationship.”40 Museum as community, then, conceives
of knowing and learning as a process of “human relationship.” This process
also implements the museum’s mission, which is to empower students and
teachers to make meaningful connections to art and each other through
dialogue and discourse.
With this mission in mind, a community of diverse preservice elemen-
tary teachers and secondary students recently set out to establish an alter-
native museum through a process of human relationship. Theirs was a pro-
cess of applying constructivist learning strategies, of giving voice and
sharing different perspectives in dynamic spaces which they created on a
university campus, in the campus galleries, and on the gallery patio. Work-
ing in groups of five or six, they filled these spaces with relationships ener-
gized by a variety of contemporary and conceptual art objects and by each
other’s ideas about the art and its meanings in their worlds. Clearly con-
nected and engaged in these spaces, they found out “how important art is
118 Carol S. Jeffers

to people all over” (tenth grader) and that “paintings have different mean-
ings to different people” (eighth grader).41 They learned about themselves,
as for example, this tenth grader who said she “found out who [she] really
was and what [she] likes.”42 Together, they were able to create a “lattice-
work of thoughts and points of view that interweave and complement each
other” (CB, 35). Through the dialogical practices of these communities, the
art objects of four challenging exhibitions were endowed with meanings
and repositioned within the real world. The process of making meaning
was the museum as process and these preservice teachers and secondary
students became its curators of personal and public knowledge.

NOTES

1. Christopher Knight, “Your Ticket to Eternity: Commentary,” Los Angeles Times

Calendar, 1999, 5 September 1999, p. 8.
2. Available online at: <www.nga.gov>. Last accessed 9/30/2000.
3. Available online at: <www.getty.edu/museum/>. Last accessed 8/27/2000.
4. Paul Bolin and Melinda Mayer, “Art Museums and Schools as Partners in
Learning,” NAEA Advisory, Spring (Reston, Va.: National Art Education Asso-
ciation, 1998), 1.
5. Nancy R. Johnson, “Aesthetic Socialization During School Tours in an Art Mu-
seum,” Studies in Art Education 23, no. 1 (1981): 55-64.”
6. Suzi Gablik, Conversations before the End of Time (New York: Thames and
Hudson, 1995), 247. This book will be cited as CB in the text for all subsequent
references.
7. Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (1967; reprint, New York: Zone Books, 1994),
211.
8. Ibid., 12.
9. Eileen Hooper-Greenhill and Flora Kaplan, Museum Meanings (New York: Rout-
ledge, 1997), book review in George Hein, Learning in the Museum (New York:
Routledge, 1998).
10. Bolin and Mayer, “Art Museums and Schools as Partners in Learning,” 1.
11. Carol S. Jeffers, “Empowering Children to Construct Meaning in Art Museums,”
Journal of Arts and Learning Research 15, no. 1 (1999): 100.
12. Anna Kindler and Bernard Darras, “Young Children and Museums: The Role of
Cultural Context in Early Development of Attitudes, Beliefs, and Behaviors,”
Visual Arts Research 23 (1997): 127 and Jeffers, “Empowering Children to Con-
struct Meaning in Art Museums,” 99.
13. Jeffers “Empowering Children to Construct Meaning in Art Museums,” 99.
14. Terry Zeller, “Museums and the Goals of Art Education,” Art Education 40, no. 1
(1987): 53, and Elliot Eisner and Stephen Dobbs, “Silent Pedagogy: How Muse-
ums Help Visitors Experience Exhibitions,” Art Education 41, no. 4 (1988): 7.
15. Jeffers “Empowering Children to Construct Meaning in Art Museums,” 99.
16. Knight, “Your Ticket to Eternity,” 8.
17. Hein, Learning in the Museum.
18. Ibid., 4.
19. Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: Univer-
sity of Minnesota Press, 1977). This book will be cited as SP in the text for all
subsequent references.
20. Johnson, “Aesthetic Socialization During School Tours,” 63.
21. Ibid.
22. Hein, Learning in the Museum, 4.
 Museum as Process 119
23. Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, 212.
24. N.C.M. Brown, “The Spectacle of the Artist in Art Education,” paper presented at
the annual convention of the National Art Education Association, Washington,
DC, March 1999.
25. Robert Ott, “Museums and Schools as Universal Partners in Art Education,” Art
Education 33 (1980): 7-9.
26. Brown, “The Spectacle of the Artist in Art Education,” 4.
27. John Dewey, The Quest for Certainty, in John Dewey: The Later Works, vol. 4, ed. Jo
Ann Boydston (1929; reprinted, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press,
1988), 19.
28. Goodwin Liu, “Knowledge, Foundations, and Discourse: Philosophical Support
for Service-learning,” Michigan Journal of Community Service-Learning 2 (1995): 6.
29. Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, 1931.
30. Ibid., 29.
31. Don Cunningham, “Cognition as Semiosis: The Role of Inference,” 1999. Avail-
able online at: http://php.ucs.indiana.edu/~cunningh/theory.html
32. John Dewey, “Contributions to a Cyclopedia of Education,” in John Dewey: The
Middle Years 1899-1924, vol. 6., ed. Jo Ann Boydston (1911; reprinted, Carbondale:
Southern University Press, 1978), 424.
33. R.S. Prawat, R. S. (1999). “Dewey, Peirce, and the Learning Paradox,” American
Educational Research Journal 36, no. 1 (1999): 51.
34. Ibid., 51.
35. Liu, “Knowledge, Foundations, and Discourse,”14.
36. Ibid. 14.
37. Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), 29.
38. Liu, “Knowledge, Foundations, and Discourse,”14.
39. Ibid.
40. Gilligan, In a Different Voice, 173.
41. Carol S. Jeffers, “A New Look at the Old Art Museum Field Trip,” paper pre-
sented at the annual convention of the National Art Education Association, Los
Angeles, April 2000.
42. Ibid.