Seeing a Museum

Looking at artifacts in a museum is entirely different than looking at the same artifacts in their natural state. What a museum does is put these various artifacts into a historical framework that can help the viewer to understand what context to put the knowledge of the artifact into. A museum uses a variety of ways in which to do this. It can be as simple as the layout of the museum, the way the lighting focuses on the artifact, the way the objects are dispersed throughout an exhibit, or the amount of information and background presented with the object. When I was in Hawaii, I visited Pearl Harbor to see the USS Arizona Memorial, which is also considered a museum. The order in which the artifacts and information were presented created a large emotional impact on everyone that was there. It began with a walk-through of various artifacts taken from the wreckage and from WWII in general. After giving the visitor a sad background into the war's beginning and end, groups of visitors are brought into a theatre room where they watch a video of the United States' entrance into the war. After watching actual footage of the Japanese attacks, the video concludes with a few modern day facts about the memorial site. After this, a shuttle takes the viewers out to the water where the Arizona is submerged in water. Lists of the names of the men that died are listed on the memorial, giving the viewer a somber depiction of WWII.


http://www.nps.gov/valr/index.htm

Does Spiral Jetty Make the Great Salt Lake A Museum?

As I was looking at the Spiral Jetty and thinking about its overall role in the Great Salt Lake, I kept in mind one important concept of what a museum does: does it contribute to the progress and knowledge of human society?
This question in itself is difficult to respond to. On one hand, the artist Robert Smithson emphasized that the jetty would be under the effect of the elements that surround it; meaning that whatever happens to it should be completely natural to the environment encompassing it. On the other hand, the fact that this piece of art is so affected by its surroundings calls into account the effects we have over the environment. Some people could say that the jetty is a testament to the way we treat the environment. With so much pollution in the air, the environment experiences drought, lowering the water levels and revealing the salt and silt buildup on the jetty, which has turned considerably white. If you look at it in this way, the jetty is part of a museum that attempts to illustrate the effects we have on the environment.
In my opinion, the Spiral Jetty is not part of a greater museum. When I think of what a museum does, one word quickly comes to mind: preservation. Museums are known for preserving art and artifacts so that they may be able to present them in a way that the viewer may relate to. The Spiral Jetty is definitely not a preserved piece of art; people have been known to run off with its rocks, write notes in the sand around it and litter it. Not to mention that it is slowly being degraded away by its environment. There is no degree of preservation occurring around the jetty, and if there is, it is not very effective. It is for this reason that I don’t think the Great Salt Lake is a museum.