The end of the year is a time to reflect.
As I look back over the year, the things I’ve read and the discussions I’ve had, it’s given me pause to think about my own biases, assumptions and weaknesses. How do these shape my work and my approach to interpretation?
First, some context: my academic background is in the sciences. My subject choices at school became increasingly sciencey as the years progressed. Of course, to choose science was also to reject other options. In my case I think it’s just as telling to consider the path not chosen as the one that was. Was I drawn to the sciences or repelled by the arts? Perhaps a bit of both.
I dropped art fairly early on in high school – mainly because I lacked any real creative skill or talent in the visual sense. I was, however, fairly skilled at writing and this was my creative outlet. For as long as English lessons focused on the mechanics of grammar or the creativity of free writing, I enjoyed it and did well. But that all stopped when English ceased being about creation and started being about criticism. Frankly, it got all opaque and impenetrable to me. We were now supposed to deconstruct the intent of another author, find metaphors in poetry and hidden meanings in literary text. I just didn’t get it! If an author wanted to say something, why didn’t they just say it? I struggled writing essays with minimum word counts when I felt I had said all that I could meaningfully say in half that.
By contrast, school science was an oasis of sense and logic – there were rules; you learned them; you applied them. As you grasped the rules you started to see the patterns in them. Chemistry in particular made perfect intuitive sense to me. Inevitably, I was drawn to the certainty of the sciences rather than take my chances on the humanities, where so much of your grade seemed to be down to teacher judgement or sheer luck.
While age and maturity mean I now have a renewed appreciation for the arts and humanities, I’m still stumped by things like poetry. Every now and again I duck into literature, but I worry that there is some grand metaphor that I’m completely oblivious to, and that I’m really only seeing the tip of the iceberg. In short, sometimes the arts can make me feel pretty darn stupid.
So what does that mean for my approach to interpretation?
I think it means I’m particularly wary of anything that does not make its intent explicit – anything that expects me to “make my own meaning” with minimal support. Make my own meaning with what? How? How do I know that I haven’t got completely the wrong end of the stick? While I might critique it once I know it, I still want to know what the ‘official’ answer is supposed to be.
I’m aware some people are polar opposites. They love the freedom to make their own meaning and can find interpretive tools (that I find essential) a distraction or even an intrusion. Perhaps they grasp something intuitively in the art or literature in the same way I did in chemical equations. Perhaps they have confidence in their own interpretations in a way that I don’t. Perhaps their brains are just wired differently. I don’t know. I do know when I meet such people though, as they tend to find interpretation “shouty”, overbearing, or dumbing down. I’ll call such people “meaning makers”, to distinguish from people like me who are probably more “meaning readers”.
Being a meaning reader must influence my approach to interpretation. To my mind I’m putting clarity before confusion. But is that how a meaning maker would see it?
In any case, how can we accommodate both in the same experiences? How do we not shout at the meaning makers, while still providing enough context to ensure the meaning readers don’t end up feeling like they’ve missed the point?
Are you a meaning maker or a meaning reader? What does it mean for your approach to interpretation and exhibitions?
Interesting post! In quite the opposite to you, I gravitated to the Humanities side: chemistry was quite illogical to me!! I had similar thoughts about authors: if they wanted to say something, why didn’t they just say it? But with my music education, I realized that writing (words or music) became a means for some to express their innermost thoughts in what sometimes had to be a covert way. Shostakovich and the (still occurring) debate re: ‘Honest Communist’ or ‘Secret Dissident’ is a great example of this. But interestingly enough, although we seem to have quite different backgrounds, I would consider myself to be a meaning reader, and possibly because I think there are people who know a lot more about the subject matter at hand than me.
As for how to accommodate meaning makers as well, I’m really not sure! Other than to add “…or interpret this in whatever way you see fit!” to the end of the written descriptions. Perhaps some ideas for that aspect are better coming from Museum-types, but it is a very interesting thing to ponder! I have lots of things running around my head relating to librarians and their need to make ‘interpretations’ (maybe more accurately ‘judgements’) when cataloguing, and linking that to your post, but as is often the case with these things it would be better served with a chat over coffee! Still, I hope I have contributed something… K 🙂
I’m not going to tell you which way my mind is wired – while agreeing that there really does seem to be a metaphorical wiring thing going on here, as with so much else of personality – but it has set me to wonder which way the majority of interpretation people are: my guess would be that almost all are ‘meaning readers’. And while, Regan, you have acknowledged that explicit interpretation may seem shouty to ‘meaning makers’ (I know this is correct, from curators’ unhappy reactions to my attempts at copyediting their art gallery labels), I’d hope they’d admit that the ‘let people make their own meanings’ way drives hard-core interpretationists nuts.
@Katherine: yes, Shostakovich is an interesting case; but symphonic music, as the most abstract of the arts, is naturally listener-interpretable. Exhibition interpretation, if it has a function at all, can’t be that, surely? Of course Shostakovich’s p.o.v. in the Soviet system is heavy stuff; Vaughan Williams (an apparently down-to-earth kind of a fellow) had some deliberately down-to-earth things to say about his own work, e.g. (from memory) “I don’t know if I like it, but it’s what I meant”. Sartre is the more serious contender for relevance here – you could say his philosophy was bound to be duff (if you believe philosophy is autobiographical) since, post WW2, he was living the double lie of his claimed role in the Resistance and non-collaboration with the Nazis – and he takes us neatly back to where we started with Regan’s post, since he’s the progenitor of the postmodernist tendency from which, I fear, the “let them do their own interpretation” people got the idea.
It’s interesting you talk about backgrounds and tendencies of interpreters John. Now that I think about it, it puts a new perspective on a recent philosophical clash I had – a meaning maker thinking we’re cheating the visitor of something if we make it too easy for them; meanwhile me as a meaning reader saying that I would not have the wherewithal to solve the ‘puzzle’ unless I had some kind of clue or hook to work with. For me the proof of the pudding is in what visitors actually *do*, and I’d be happily proved wrong if most visitors seemed to ‘get’ it without the prompting I suggested. That’s the scientist in me!
Actually I’ve been struck by how many people in visitor studies have a background in the sciences – one of my very first mentors in this area, Ben Gammon (then of the Science Museum, London), has a PhD in the biological sciences. I have always assumed this preponderance of scientists is because (historically at least) science and natural history museums are more likely to employ visitor researchers than art or history museums. But maybe there is more to it than that.
A further comment on background, and this is something that Katherine alluded to above on expertise – to some extent being a meaning maker depends on background knowledge. As Sue Hodges commented on Facebook: “I’m more of a meaning maker but it’s because I have a huge amount of context to draw from.” In other words, knowing a lot about a subject increases the likelihood that you can ‘decode’ more complex meanings. While there is still clearly an intuitive aspect to it, hence the school days anecdote above, prior knowledge will be a factor. In fact, this could be the “curse of knowledge” that the Heath brothers describe – once you know something, it’s hard to know what it’s like to *not* know it (that might be your art curators’ problem John!).
Another thing I didn’t mention above was the purposes of different museums – on Twitter @julesboag made the interesting distinction that: “interpretation in museums should seek to answer questions and in art galleries, ask questions.”
I think there’s probably room for both, as at Hyde Park Barracks – some things are left open; others explained. I am increasingly curious about interpreters’ roles in ‘making meaning’ for others and how this is challenged by both the digital environment, where people navigate their own meanings, and postmodern historical theory, which is democratising in intent. In history, we have been working with this issue for many years – are we really the ‘experts’ in telling other people’s stories? What power do we have to interpret an other race, community etc? Do people still want an authority telling them what to think about a subject? In my work in history (as perhaps distinct from interpretation), I’m generally working on the premise that we create a framework that facilitates other people’s experiences of a topic and enables them to add their own meanings – we provide ways of doing so through our narratives and through open-ended questions. This is democratising in intent and draws from the work of the new social history since the 1970s. There is a great museum – the Museum of Broken Hearts – in Croatia that is an example of this kind of interactivity.
More challenging in terms of visitor responses, too, what if we challenge, upset or confront visitors and explicitly don’t give them what they want? Maybe it’s better to challenge and upset one visitor and make a difference, than to give a number of visitors an experience they find agreeable and satisfying. This happened to me years ago in a national touring exhibition, where I confronted people in remote WA with stories about Aboriginal massacres – and was met with fury. However, two people wrote in the visitors’ book that this exhibition had changed their views of Aboriginal history and they were very glad they had seen it. This is one of my proudest achievements as an historian, but I wouldn’t have got there had I asked these people what they wanted to see. This doesn’t apply to most of our interpretive work, but historians are not trained to tell stories alone, but to make judgements about them and expose ‘the truth’ based on evidence, problematic though this is. For this reason, I also get really worried about proselytising in interpretation and how this is often unquestioned by natural environment interpreters – that is, it’s fine to save elephants or orangutans, but not fine to use interpretation in the same way in the humanities (think how the Nazis twisted history with the aim of changing behaviour). These are just residual questions and random thoughts at the moment, so please excuse the lack of structure, but I am investigating these topics for my PhD so more soon.
Hi Sue,
I think it’s important to draw a distinction between challenging visitors through telling confronting stories, and challenging visitors by either confusing them or not giving them enough information to work with. In the example you cite, there was no confusion about what you were saying, even if the result was fury among some visitors. There is a big difference between that and leaving an experience scratching your head wondering “what was all that about”? However I think sometimes the two get conflated – we should challenge visitors by all means, but not needlessly confuse them.
Agree! Good distinction. 🙂
Great post, Regan, and fascinating discussion. I had to go away for a few days to think about this whole ‘meaning making’/’meaning reading’ dichotomy. By the time I get back there is a shedload of other stuff to talk about.
Unsurprisingly, as a poet whose academic background is in the biological sciences, I cannot see the dichotomy as clearly as others seem to. Some of this may be semantic. I am clear that knowledge is not ‘meaning’, nor is information. I see the construction of meaning as a personal response to a new stimulus that frames it within the context of that individual’s memory and experience. This is why I bang on and on about getting people ‘thinking and talking’; that is where both meaning and memory are forged.
I suspect that ‘memory-readers’ are actually choosing to go through this process through engaging, critically or otherwise, with the information content – it may be that they are predominantly verbal people (like me) so words are their preferred thought forms. My observations of predominantly visual people leads to suspect that they relate primarily to the objects themselves. I suspect both types of person go through an essentially similar, complex process of accepting, rejecting, reforming, categorising, filing, comparing new data that is in fact very similar. I would bet that a gang of ‘meaning -readers’ would actually construct (or make) different meanings form the same experience. I would love to know is that is so.
A big problem is that we can’t remember what we didn’t notice.
I like the idea of museums giving answers, and galleries posing questions but it’s too glib. Sue and Regan are right, I thin , that we all need some context (and I would cite the Eduard Munch exhibition at Tate Modern, London earlier this year as a brilliant example of altering people’s perspective through providing new context in a very unshouty way). I vehemently agree with Sue that science interpretation, including conservation interpretation (my specialist area, if I have one), cannot be seen as above or beyond question and debate. If it becomes so, it is a) dangerous (as Sue points out from a very helpful historian perspective) and b) less engaging and effective (or ‘too shouty’).
Regan, you should look at Gail Richards’ blog where she has posted in response (i think to this). Her voice would be good here too.
Thanks for the tip – link to Gail’s blog post here http://gailrichard.wordpress.com/2012/12/27/meaning-as-interpretation/ for anyone else who is interested. Gail’s point about multiple voices and listeners is a reminder to me of interpretation as a ‘process’. Too often we get caught up in ‘products’ or deliverables – exhibitions, text panels, media and neglect the ‘process’ as a result. I’m guilty of this – it’s a symptom of my project-driven background where it’s the deliverable that counts (it’s what’s specified in the contract!).
Susan – you might be interested in some research that has come out of the Smithsonian about different visitor preferences – they have identified three main dispositions: one for Objects, one for Ideas, and one for People. Apparently these are very strong predictors for what people notice, attend to and prefer in exhibition experiences http://www.curatorjournal.org/archives/459
Great response, Susan! And a fascinating debate. Good for Regan for starting it. It could actually be the subject of a conference, I think – it seems to hit at some of the major questions we’re all thinking about.