Juxtaposition

    One of the most powerful and simple design techniques for activating objects as social objects is juxtaposition. Rarely employed in online platforms, juxtaposition of artifacts was the basis for several groundbreaking exhibitions like Fred Wilson's Mining the Museum, presented in 1992 at the Maryland Historical Society. For Mining the Museum, Wilson selected artifacts from the Historical Society's collection--objects that were overlooked or might have been perceived to have little evocative power--and used them as the basis for highly provocative, active, relational exhibits. Mining the Museum opened with a display of busts, as described by Judith Stein in Art in America: "Three low pedestals to the right of the case supported portrait busts below eye level. Harsh lighting caused shadows to pool in their eye cavities, imparting an air of cranky melancholia to a toga-clad Henry Clay, and Napoleon Bonaparte and Andrew Jackson in uniform. None of these worthies had ever lived in Maryland; they exemplify those previously deemed deserving of sculptural representation and subsequent museum acquisition. To the left were three higher and empty pedestals that bore only small plaques proclaiming the names of celebrated African Americans who were Marylanders: Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass and Benjamin Banneker.  By dramatizing the absence of their portraits, Wilson found a canny way to reveal the slights of history and to indicate major gaps in the museum's collections."

    With this simple and powerful display, Wilson was able to put museum objects (the busts of the white men) in conversation with non-objects (the absent busts of the local African Americans). While the objects themselves were unremarkable, the platform on which they were presented added a provocative, relational layer to their presentation, which translated to a more social reception by visitors. Juxtaposition implies obvious questions: "Why are these here and those missing?"  "What's going on here?" Curators and museum educators often ask questions like this, but these questions can fall flat when presented as a teachable moment. In Mining the Museum, these questions were not explicit but bubbled naturally to the top of visitors' minds, and so people sought out opportunities for dialogue. There were other powerful juxtapositions in Mining the Museum, such as an exhibit on "Metalwork, 1723-1880" which featured a fancy silver tea set alongside a pair of slave shackles.

    The cognitive dissonance visitors feel when encountering strange combinations spark questions that are unanswered in label text. To find the answers, and their own reactions, to provocative challenges on display, visitors turn to each other. Mining the Museum generated a great deal of professional and academic conversation that continues to this day. But it also energized visitors to the Maryland Historical Society, who engaged in dialogue with each other and with staff, both verbally and via written reactions, which were assembled in a community response exhibit. Mining the Museum was the well-attended Maryland Historical Society exhibition to date when it closed, and it fundamentally reoriented the institution with respect to its collection and relationship with community.

    Several art museum exhibitions have used juxtaposition in a less politicized way to activate visitor engagement. In 1990, the Hirshorn Museum and Sculpture Garden mounted an exhibition called Comparisons: An Exercise in Looking in which pairs of art objects were hung together with a single question in-between. By asking visitors to connect two pieces via an explicitly relational query, the artifacts were activated as social objects in conversation with each other. While the juxtaposition may not have consistently supported visitor dialogue, it provided the tools for discussion in a venue in which visitors often feel uncertain about how to respond to the art on display.

    In 2004, the Cantor Art Center at Stanford University took this idea further and presented Question, "an experiment that provokes questions about art and its presentation in museums." Rather than just displaying art in a neutral way along with questions on labels, Question featured radical display techniques that were intended to tease out but not answer basic questions that visitor have about art, like "what makes it art?" "how much does it cost?" and "what does it mean?" The team mounted artworks by famous artists and children together on a refrigerator. They crowded European paintings against a cramped chain-link fence and mounted other pieces in natural settings with sound environments and comfortable seating. All of these unusual and surprising design techniques were meant to provoke dialogue. As exhibit designer Darcie Fohrman commented, "In the museum field, we know that learning happens when there is discussion and conversation. We want people to ask strange questions and say, 'I don't get this.'" 

    As in Mining the Museum, the design techniques chosen for Question were strategically optimized to promote the artifacts as social objects. This means that in many cases, the objects were not presented in a way that allowed visitors to approach them from a "neutral" perspective or even necessarily to enjoy viewing them. It's hard to take pleasure in a silver tea set that is forcibly paired with a set of slave shackles, and a refrigerator is probably not the ideal aesthetic setting for a sketch by Miro. By designing the exhibitions as successful social platforms, these exhibitions drew in new and enthusiastic crowds, but they also turned off some visitors for whom the approach was unfamiliar and unappealing. Just as Flickr's choice to allow users to write notes on photos may be distracting to some photography buffs who prefer unadulterated images, these socializing exhibition techniques are in conflict with other museum values. This conflict doesn't mean we shouldn't pursue activating museum artifacts as social objects, but we must be aware that doing so can come at a price.

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