CALL
FOR PAPERS
The
Period Room: Museum, Material, Experience
Friday 19th
& Saturday 20th September 2014
The
Bowes Museum, Barnard Castle, County Durham
Since the late 19th century the Period Room has been a
consistent presence in the public museum, and yet over the past 25 years the
Period Room has become a contentious museum object, leading many museums to
question the legitimacy of the Period Room as an effective and appropriate
method of display and interpretation. As dislocated fragments, often remodelled
to fit the spaces of the museum, the Period Room is, for some, a signifier for
the inauthentic, an outmoded method of display and a representation of
unfashionable museum interpretation. The problems associated with Period Rooms
are exacerbated by the fact that they are large and bulky objects, difficult
and expensive to redisplay or reinterpret. Many museums retain their Period
Room displays, but the recent changes in the perspectives on Period Rooms have also
led a number of museums in the UK, Europe and the USA to reconsider their
continued relevance as museum objects, to dismantle and deaccession the
displays, and in some cases to repatriate the Period Rooms to their places of
origin (if that still exists of course).
This conference, held at the
Bowes Museum, which redisplayed its own collection of Period Rooms in 2007-10, aims
to consider the Period Room from a wide variety of perspectives in order to
address some key questions about Period Rooms and the history of Period Rooms
display in Museums: Should Period Rooms be considered objects in their own
right, or merely ‘contexts’ for related material? How, and in what ways, did
Period Rooms satisfy ideas of museum interpretation, and how and why did these
attitudes change? What was the role of the evolving frameworks of
national/local heritage in the appearance of Period Rooms in museums? What
were/are the theoretical, technical and aesthetic frameworks for the display of
Period Rooms in museums? How, and in what ways, is the Period Room different
from, or similar to, the Historic Interior?
We invite papers to explore these
themes and relationships from a wide range of perspectives and from a wide
range of organisations, institutions and disciplines, from academics (historians,
art historians, literary and film historians), museum curators and
professionals, exhibition designers, technicians and craft-workers):
Themes for consideration may include:
The processes of the circulation, display and redisplay of Period Rooms
– the dealers, merchants, decorators, collectors, and museum curators and their
roles in the changing taste for the Period Room.
Case Studies of Period Rooms – the history of specific displays in
museums and other public institutions; their provenance, removal and reconstruction;
display and interpretation.
The philosophical history of the Period Room as a particular mode of
engagement with the past - as an historical space, as a space of historical
empathy, and as an immersive environment.
The material and technical aspects of Period Room display; the
challenges of redisplay in museum contexts, what the objects reveal about the
history of their making and the history of museum interpretation.
The ‘Period Room’ in literature, film and visual culture; how was/is the
Period Room/Historic Interior imagined, and what can these perspectives tell us
about how we engage with the Period Room in the museum?
Please send abstracts of no more than 400 words to the conference
organisers:
Dr Mark Westgarth (School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural
Studies, University of Leeds) m.w.westgarth@leeds.ac.uk
Dr Jane Whittaker (The Bowes Museum) jane.whittaker@thebowesmuseum.org.uk
Closing Date for Abstracts: 31st March 2014.
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