Past and Present
"'Gulag,' a Show at Ellis Island, Depicts a Penal System Gone Awry"
By Edward Rothstein
Much of how a culture deals with its present depends on how it represents the past. Governments and establishments who can shape the interpretation of past actions have a potent card up their sleeve. Many of those who deal in history act as though they are sitting in a politically untouchable position, unassailable by any notion of bias because they deal in 'fact', in reporting things that concretely 'have happened'. Ultimately though, these dealers have the choice as to which facts they will represent in their various versions of history, in what light they will be portrayed, and how much analysis they are subjected to.
Museums, those institutions of history, have similar afflictions. Even in art museums, a curator must decide exactly their idea of legitimate artwork, and on which population focus may fall. Museums of human tragedy or injustice, are of a new breed, and it is over this specific new breed that the New York Times shines its light.
Its approach to this is only slightly more weird than the initial question of inclusion/exclusion facing the exhibiting body itself. The newspaperman seems a bit uncomfortable with a non-exclusive version of social injustice, in which people everywhere do the same kinds of bad things.
While purporting to be about "'Gulag,' a Show at Ellis Island", the article wraps up with a much broader conclusion. The author has discovered the exhibit's link to the International Coalition of Historic Site Museums of Conscience and proceeds in a cursory comparison of the sites.
That coalition now has 14 sites, which range from a 19th-century workhouse in Britain to a slave house in Senegal, from the Theresienstadt concentration camp in the Czech Republic to the Lower East Side Tenement Museum in New York. Not to be left out, the National Park Service has its own displays about "civic engagement" and points out that three of its sites are "accredited members of the coalition": the Women's Rights National Historical Park in Seneca Falls, N.Y.; the Eleanor Roosevelt National Historic Site in Hyde Park, N.Y.; and the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site in Atlanta.
We then proceed to the kicker.
No doubt noble sentiments are at work in this roster, but as a result, all specificity and judgment disappears; conscience consumes everything and contains nothing. To make a grand rhetorical gesture, encompassing all human injustice when one particular example seems inconveniently egregious, has become a museum ritual, a political tic.
In what appears to be his own 'grand rhetorical gesture', Ed Rothstein, has dismissed the notion that oppressions are linked and oppressors, comparable. He gives his example, "a final multimedia display in which the Holocaust was calculatedly eclipsed by invocations of every contemporary example of racial and social injustice the museum could formulate." He accuses The National Underground Railroad Freedom Center as doing the same thing, ending "with a potpourri of international injustices".
Back at Gulag central, he sees the same approach, essentially pulling the 'moral relativism' card.
Actually, it cheapens injustice, leaving everyone equally guilty and equally innocent. Are 19th-century English workhouses and New York tenements comparable in any way to the gulag? Is the plight of women before receiving the vote similar to the starving of Kolyma prisoners, who scrambled in the ice to eat prehistoric amphibians?
Mr. Ed Rothstein, I believe what you mean is that their injustices are greater than ours. Ye olde, East vs West. He goes on...
Harvard University's National Resource Center for Russian, East European and Central Asian Studies is developing curriculum packets for this exhibition. (After July 4, it will go to Boston University, and then to Independence, Calif.; Atlanta; Poughkeepsie, N.Y.; and Washington.) The educational material I was sent is careful and informed, but here and there are whiffs of this homogenized conscience:
"Are there lessons to be learned from a study of the gulag that might apply to prison systems in countries like the United States?" the curriculum proposes asking students. "For example, should prisoners in this country be forced to work jobs such as picking up trash on the highway?"
No, Mr. Rothstein, there are not.
By Edward Rothstein
Much of how a culture deals with its present depends on how it represents the past. Governments and establishments who can shape the interpretation of past actions have a potent card up their sleeve. Many of those who deal in history act as though they are sitting in a politically untouchable position, unassailable by any notion of bias because they deal in 'fact', in reporting things that concretely 'have happened'. Ultimately though, these dealers have the choice as to which facts they will represent in their various versions of history, in what light they will be portrayed, and how much analysis they are subjected to.
Museums, those institutions of history, have similar afflictions. Even in art museums, a curator must decide exactly their idea of legitimate artwork, and on which population focus may fall. Museums of human tragedy or injustice, are of a new breed, and it is over this specific new breed that the New York Times shines its light.
Its approach to this is only slightly more weird than the initial question of inclusion/exclusion facing the exhibiting body itself. The newspaperman seems a bit uncomfortable with a non-exclusive version of social injustice, in which people everywhere do the same kinds of bad things.
While purporting to be about "'Gulag,' a Show at Ellis Island", the article wraps up with a much broader conclusion. The author has discovered the exhibit's link to the International Coalition of Historic Site Museums of Conscience and proceeds in a cursory comparison of the sites.
That coalition now has 14 sites, which range from a 19th-century workhouse in Britain to a slave house in Senegal, from the Theresienstadt concentration camp in the Czech Republic to the Lower East Side Tenement Museum in New York. Not to be left out, the National Park Service has its own displays about "civic engagement" and points out that three of its sites are "accredited members of the coalition": the Women's Rights National Historical Park in Seneca Falls, N.Y.; the Eleanor Roosevelt National Historic Site in Hyde Park, N.Y.; and the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site in Atlanta.
We then proceed to the kicker.
No doubt noble sentiments are at work in this roster, but as a result, all specificity and judgment disappears; conscience consumes everything and contains nothing. To make a grand rhetorical gesture, encompassing all human injustice when one particular example seems inconveniently egregious, has become a museum ritual, a political tic.
In what appears to be his own 'grand rhetorical gesture', Ed Rothstein, has dismissed the notion that oppressions are linked and oppressors, comparable. He gives his example, "a final multimedia display in which the Holocaust was calculatedly eclipsed by invocations of every contemporary example of racial and social injustice the museum could formulate." He accuses The National Underground Railroad Freedom Center as doing the same thing, ending "with a potpourri of international injustices".
Back at Gulag central, he sees the same approach, essentially pulling the 'moral relativism' card.
Actually, it cheapens injustice, leaving everyone equally guilty and equally innocent. Are 19th-century English workhouses and New York tenements comparable in any way to the gulag? Is the plight of women before receiving the vote similar to the starving of Kolyma prisoners, who scrambled in the ice to eat prehistoric amphibians?
Mr. Ed Rothstein, I believe what you mean is that their injustices are greater than ours. Ye olde, East vs West. He goes on...
Harvard University's National Resource Center for Russian, East European and Central Asian Studies is developing curriculum packets for this exhibition. (After July 4, it will go to Boston University, and then to Independence, Calif.; Atlanta; Poughkeepsie, N.Y.; and Washington.) The educational material I was sent is careful and informed, but here and there are whiffs of this homogenized conscience:
"Are there lessons to be learned from a study of the gulag that might apply to prison systems in countries like the United States?" the curriculum proposes asking students. "For example, should prisoners in this country be forced to work jobs such as picking up trash on the highway?"
No, Mr. Rothstein, there are not.
posted by Assonance Not Apathy at 9:33 PM
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