Museum Exhibition Design
Museum exhibition can be used for social, historical and civic education (Bennett 102). Traditional museum environments are institutions that collect works of art considered to be important within a historical context. Museums, in collaboration with other mediums like architecture and graphic design, utilize semiotics and elements of design to create carefully crafted visual narratives. Historically, museums create different cultural narratives at different time periods (Goodnow and Akman 207). Museum exhibitions are both an expressive art of themselves and also a showcase for other forms of art such as photography, paintings, advertisements and cinema. Exhibitions are a forum in which art, history, popular culture and mass media are designed into narratives that inform about the past and convey messages about the present and the future.
Art and visual literacy involves interpreting information by viewing images and perceptions (Machado and Jeanne 153). It applies artistic language through the use of sign language and codes. Observers interpret information according to the observations they make. The concept of art and visual literacy uses, extensively, the idea of culture. Images used in art works, usually, have a simple meaning and a deeper interpretation of what they represent. In visual literacy, perception is used as a key element in studies. Artwork involves the use of sculpture, architecture and painting in expressing feelings that view and interpret images. Mass media relates to art since it involves interpretation and viewing of signs. For a long time, mass media has incorporated the use of ideas, wanted by writers, to communicate to the entire population. Mass media, just like fine art, requires community art programs and performing arts. Visual literacy, arts administration, mass media and art make use of perception in interpretation.
The central theme of the museum exhibition design is historical representations of hip-hop album covers during the 1980s. The theme was chosen because the album covers used forms of art like proximity, alignment and repetition to express a deeper meaning and attract viewers. The cultural and historical significance of hip-hop album covers during the 1980s is that they brought reaction to the viewers since the designs on the albums carried a deeper meaning that was beyond mere entertainment. The reactions included joy, pain, sorrow, anger, defeat confusion, victory, clarity, happiness, humor, etc.
Design elements used by the hip-hop album covers during the 1980s created a framework for almost all designed imagery. Designed imagery is what makes up the daily world including the newspaper, billboards, magazines, cinema, television and homes. Designers of the album covers wrote the elements while viewers read them as part of complex visual narratives. All shapes in the design of the album covers were made up from a dot since it is the simplest, irreducibly minimum unit of visual communication. Dots were placed together to create images. Continuous marks were made by placing a marker point on a surface and moving it along, leaving the formed marks to create a line. Different shapes created by combination of lines formed designs on the hip-hop album covers during the 1980s. The created shapes, for instance squares, triangles, rectangles etc, created emotional responses from viewers of the album covers.
Proximity was applied in the grouping of related objects together on the hip-hop album covers during the 1980s. This showed that related objects have a relationship with each other. As the objects were grouped together, they created recognizable patterns for the album cover viewer’s eye.
All objects on hip-hop album covers during the 1980s were placed in a way that they all had a visual connection to other things in design, in respect to the aspect of design. This created a balanced, stronger, and a more cohesive overall design. Some elements were repeated throughout the overall design of the album covers to create consistency by using recognizable elements that were repeated to frame people’s viewing experience. This created rhythm within the overall design and pattern that allowed the designers to help the viewers identify important visual cues on the album covers.
Objects that were very different on hip-hop album covers, for instance, large and small or black and white, were used in tandem to create visual designs. This created a dynamic composition within the overall design, which captured and directed the eye. It, also, assisted in achieving balance within the design and created a striking visual interest to hold the attention of viewers.
The colors on hip-hop cover albums during the 1980s were created by light striking an object and reflecting back to the viewers of the album. When the reflections of light got into the human retina, they were processed through nerve fibers to the photoreceptors at the back of the eye, called cones. The cones allowed the viewers to see color, changes in light intensity and fine details on the album covers.
Hip-hop album covers during the 1980s used semiotics in their art. This involved the use of signs to convey message to the viewers of the album covers. Semiotics is the study of signs as part of social interaction. Its origin is attributed to Ferdinand de Saussure and Charles Sanders Peirce. These two individuals were instrumental in developing semiotic theory around the same time across the Atlantic. Peirce was from the US while Saussure was a Swiss. The general dates of the two individuals established that semiotics was a fairly new philosophy theory that closely echoed the psychological movements of Jung and Freud. The origin of semiotics comes from the study of linguistics. Saussure viewed linguistics as a branch of semiology. Thus, Saussure did not delineate semiotics, as it is done currently, from human language. His theory stated that by understanding the laws of semiology, people discover laws that are applicable in linguistics. This law employs structuralism, a method that describes the overall model of sign systems as a language.
Since the study of signs has undergone progression and expansion beyond its origins, cultural and social elements were applied in its use in the Hip-hop album covers during the 1980s. One of the elements use included ideology and an example was social construction. Social construction implied that what was seen was constructed socially and was not a product of a scientific-based theory as a visual grammar. A critique that came out of this is how mediated images were controlled by a dominate class. The dominate class created a false reality that served its goals in the album covers.
Since semiotics is a major approach of cultural studies under individuals like Roland Barthes, its use on the hip-hop album covers went beyond the focus of linguistics and included a system of signs, for instance, gestures, images and musical notes, which made up public entertainment. Semiotics in the album covers was used to analyze layers of communication that the hip-hop culture employed to communicate with the viewers. Signs were matched with other signs to form codes, which were then added to other codes to form genres that created a complex and layered visual narrative that informed how individuals and cultures defined themselves and others. There was an overlap of a single type of text with other texts that crossed over to other mediums on the album covers.
Basing on the semiotic theory, the art work used on the hip-hop album covers involved the use of triangle models to visualize the interaction of elements that acted upon a sign to give meaning. A large portion of visual literacy theory was also applied to make use of the same type of model. Originally, the model used was an adaptation of Peirce’s triadic model, in contrast to Saussure’s two part model, that breaks down elements into representament, interpretant, and object.
An example of a triangle
Active interpretation of the art on the hip-hop album covers created a break from the previous emphasis made by Saussure and Peirce on the actual sign at the center of the interpretation process. Through media theory, interpreters of the hip-hop album covers were brought into equal stand with the sign. The relationship between signs that ware culturally and socially constructed through collective agreements is referred to as conventional association.
Signs used on the hip-hop album covers during the 1980s were categorized into four types; Symbol signs were those in which the signifier failed to resemble the signified. These signs were purely conventional, thus the interpreter had to learn them. Examples of such signs included language in general and religious symbols. Iconic symbols were symbols in which the signifier resembled the signified. These signs possessed recognizable elements that reflected the original idea that was being represented. Examples of these signs included portraits, cartoons and sound effects. Indexical signs were signs in which the signifier was not abstracted. The signifier directly connected to the signified. This connection could, sometimes, be directly observed or inferred. Examples of these signs included natural signs like the visual recordings on the album covers.
Codes are the way signs in the hip-hop album covers during the 1980s were interpreted in relation to each other. It was the framework in which the signs made sense. The signs in the album covers were organized by codes into meaningful systems of signifiers and the signified. Since the relationship between the signifier and the signified on the album covers was arbitrary, interpretation of the sign meanings required familiarity with social conventions.
The interpretation of object in the album covers relied on the time period and culture of the viewer. This concept was similar to Leppert’s institutional frame and Baxandall’s period eye. Viewers’ needed to separate dominant shapes from the background shapes in order to be able to interpret objects on the album covers. According to Edgar’s Rubin’s ambiguous figure, if a person focused on the black shapes, they became the dominant foreground faces and the white part became the nondescript background. If they focused on the white shape of the album covers, it became the dominate vase shape and the black became the background.
The targeted intelligences for the exhibition are spatial intelligences since this type of intelligences accurately perceive the visual world (Kincheloe 105). They think in three dimensions and are able to transform a person’s perceptions and recreate the visual experience of a person through imagination.
This exhibition shows a total understanding of elements of design and semiotic sub-topics that were covered in class during lecture presentations. It also shows clear understanding of organizational skills of placing the theory and practical applications into an easy to understand museum exhibition. Since exhibit design is a work in progress, the next step after this museum exhibit will be relating it relating it with the other sub-topics like intuitive and rational experience, basic elements of photography, the period eye, etc.
Work cited:
Bennett, Tony. The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics. London, LD: Routledge,
2013. Print.
Machado, Jeanne M and Machado, Ed C. Early Childhood Experiences in Language Arts:
Emerging Literacy. Albany, NY: Delmar Publishers, 1990. Print.
Kincheloe, Joe L. Multiple Intelligences Reconsidered. New York, NY: P. Lang, 2004. Print.
Goodnow, Katherine J, and Haci Akman. Scandinavian Museums and Cultural Diversity. New
York, NY: Berghahn Books, 2008. Print.
