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Interpreting Ethiopian Culture: by Margaret M. Ropp Michigan State University Museum Abstract The major purpose of this study was to explore visitors' experiences with the exhibit, "Ethiopia: Traditions of Creativity" in general and the role that the video interpretation played in particular. The exhibition team was concerned that African art is often seen as primitive, anonymous, and devoid of creativity and they developed individual videos for the eleven featured artists in an effort to counter those stereotypes. The major finding is that the videos helped the visitors who watched them to connect the creative process, the artist and the final product. Visitors also reported that the videos made the people seem more real, personal and contemporary. Introduction In the summer of 1994, the exhibition team at the Michigan State University Museum opened an exhibit on Ethiopian culture which they hoped would break stereotypes about African peoples, cultures and creative expression. In particular, the team wanted to develop an appreciation for the relationship between the creative process, the products and the artists who produced them. The exhibition team felt that video interpretation could effectively show this complex relationship and they decided that the exhibit would center around eleven different artists and that each artist would be featured in a separate video. For example, the video of potter Tabita Hantute shows her walking around a large container, pulling up the sides of the pot with her hands. Visitors can also see scenes of Tabita during her interview as well as her family and neighbors in the village while listening to an English translation of Tabita's interview about her life, the tradition she practices and the role that it plays in her life. Through interviews with twenty visitors, this study investigates visitors' experiences with "Ethiopia: Traditions of Creativity" and the part that the videos like Tabita's played in their visit. In particular, the interviews explored the effectiveness of the chosen interpretive strategy as well as visitors' viewing habits and their reactions to the design elements of the videos such as the first-person narrative. The completed video interpretation was naturally the result of many difficult decisions and was several years in the making. In creating "Ethiopia," the curators had to face the challenges of interpreting not only culture, but creative aesthetic traditions as well. In an effort to answer these complex challenges early in the process, members of the exhibition team asked visitors in preliminary studies if they would like to see an exhibit about Ethiopian aesthetic traditions and what they would want to see in it. Visitors indicated that they would be interested in the art objects but also wanted to know who had made them, how they made them and to learn about the artists themselves. With this kind of input from visitors, the curators began to plan the design of the exhibit and the field research required to make it happen. In addition to visitor input, the exhibition team wanted to address specific concerns regarding the interpretation of Ethiopia's creative traditions as they were articulating the goals for the exhibition. Specifically, the team was concerned that African art is often displayed and seen by the public as primitive, anonymous, and devoid of creativity and the preliminary visitor studies indicated that this was the case. Robbins (1994) described the phenomenon that African art such as sculptures, everyday objects, textiles, and articles of personal adornment serve to communicate meaning within and across generations. In "Ethiopia," the exhibition team wanted to communicate the same richness and complexity described by Robbins which surrounds the creative traditions of Ethiopia. This input from visitors and curators led to the interpretive strategy of shifting the focus from the objects to a more balanced approach which emphasized the artists and the creative process through the videos. Creating the exhibit. As the exhibit's focus was on Ethiopian traditions of creativity, the research team wanted to share traditions which the Ethiopians felt were important and which represented a diversity of locations and cultures within Ethiopia. In fact, Volkert (1991) predicted that museums would begin to create exhibits with a recognition of the curatorial bias which is inherent in the choices made for any exhibition and this is one of the reasons that the research team decided to ask Ethiopians which traditions they valued rather than relying on traditional Western perceptions. Once they determined which traditions would be featured, they went to the areas which were well known for the tradition and asked the Ethiopians there who they felt was especially good at practicing a particular tradition. In that manner, the eleven artists were chosen and researchers conducted interviews with them and then commissioned or purchased works as well. More objects associated with the traditions but produced by other artists were also collected for comparison in the exhibit. In its final form, the exhibit was spread across the two museums in a total of four galleries. Examples of the artists' works were grouped around separate video viewing stations with the comparative works displayed nearby. For instance, many visitors talked about the part of the exhibit which featured the work of Tolera Tafa who made sorghum stalk models. His video was flanked by cases in which visitors could see his models of the White House, Ethiopian Orthodox churches, and airplanes as well as models which were made by other artists annd displayed in a nearby case for comparison. Photographs and labels were also used as complementary interpretive devices and a printed profile of the artist was attached to the viewing station as well. This same display structure was consistent across the featured artists and the videos shared a common format as well; they were all about two minutes in length and showed close-ups of the artists creating some of the objects in the exhibit as well as views of them talking about their traditions and scenes which included their families and homes. The audio portion of the videos consisted of excerpts from the artists' interviews which were all told from the first-person point of view. Ethiopian graduate students at Michigan State University provided the translated audio so that the narration was done in English while the videos shared a similar format in which the artists tell about the traditions they practice, how they learned them and what they mean in their lives. The video monitors at the viewing stations were placed on pedestals about three and a half feet off the floor and the exhibit staff attempted to set the volume at an intermediate level so that visitors near the station could hear and yet it wouldn't interfere with the other videos. Complementing the individualized nature of the exhibit were kiosks which addressed the general themes of traditions, creativity, and why the exhibit was created. In one gallery of the MSU Museum, the illusion of an Ethiopian marketplace was achieved by placing a wall-sized photo-mural of a typical maket scene, complete with buyers, sellers and their wares, opposite a wall-sized mirror above displays of objects which might be found there. Decisions about the video interpretation. Several factors influenced the choice of video interpretation in the exhibit. The exhibition team hypothesized that the video interpretation would be more widely used by visitors than text labeling. Additionally, they believed it would be the interpretive medium which could most effectively tie together the creative process, the product and the artist. Additionally, they anticipated that it would be the interpetive medium which most people would use. Motion video, like a live demonstration, is a natural choice to show the creative process. Visitors watching a video can gain an appreciation for the skill and dexterity required to make a woven milk container by watching the artist carefully weave the fibers tight enough to hold liquids in contrast to a still photograph which captures only an instant in that process. The team also felt that choosing to use a first-person narrative style for the video's audio track would help achieve the goal of bringing the artists into an exhibit which primarily consisted of objects - something that is not traditionally accomplished when the end products of African creativity are exhibited. The decision to use the narrative format instead of a third-person explanation of the process was a bold one for the team to make. They hoped that the individual stories would personalize the exhibit with a face and a voice and that these individual accounts might possibly access in visitors, a naturally occurring narrative mode of thought as proposed by Jerome Bruner (1985). In addition, the narratives themselves might become artifacts, surpassing the status of mere interpretation, a phenomenon which was nicely described by Snyder-Grenier and Caldwell (1992). Chadbourne (1991) argued as well that storytelling is an effective method of interweaving objects and a context, and the team intended that the narratives might accomplish the rich cultural context of meaning and importance that Robbins (1994) and Cerny (1990) advocated. The last design decision which shaped the videos was to create a physical context by varying the angles of the scenes so that viewers could see close-up shots of the artist working on the objects as well as wider shots which included the physical surroundings in which the artists worked: their homes, families and friends were included. Even though the focus of the videos is on the artists and their traditions, the exhibit is about interpreting a small section of several diverse cultures in Ethiopia and the contextual elements are equally important in the telling of the story. At this point, it is important to make a distinction about the use of the videos in this exhibition. The video medium was chosen because it could achieve the greater goals of the overall interpretive strategy the exhibition team wanted to use, less because of its merits as a technology. If there weren't a story to tell, a process to show or a context to create, then the videos might have been an expensive label. This recognition of the integral and inescapable nature of the interpretive strategy to the exhibit itself is consistent with the course recommended by Rabinowitz (1991). The exhibition team considered all of these factors very carefully when they developed the overall strategy. Rationale and purpose of the study. The decision to use videos as the key interpretive strategy in the exhibition was of major importance, not only in terms of relative expense but of breaking new ground for interpreting creative traditions as well. The major purpose of this study was to explore visitors' experiences with the exhibit in general and the role that the video interpretation played in particular. Even though the exhibition team expected the videos to communicate several themes to visitors, it was not a certainty that visitors would watch the videos in their entirety or even if they would watch them at all. One might answer that question by conducting a simple observation study, but my informal observations indicated that most visitors watched at least some of the videos during their visit. I decided to use the interview method to ask visitors about their experience in the exhibit to see if they mentioned the video interpretation without prompting and to get a feel for what it was like to visit "Ethiopia: Traditions of Creativity" from the public perspective. An interview would provide a window to the richness of visitors' experiences that might otherwise be lost through observation only. The first half of the interview protocol was then developed to probe for general experiences. The second half was constructed to elicit visitors' perspectives on the video interpretation specifically. The interview protocol can be found in the Appendix and was designed to investigate how visitors perceived the exhibit as well as to see if the aforementioned goals and design decisions of the exhibition team were successful or not. I decided to systematically interview fifteen visitors to gain an appreciation for the range of viewing habits and experiences in the gallery. After I conducted the interviews, I discovered that there would be a short period of time between the exhibit's advertised official closing and its actual removal. The exhibit department agreed to remove the video monitors in the gallery used in the study so that I could interview visitors who wouldn't have seen a major piece of the interpretive strategy. With such an opportunity, I was able to get some comparative data and I interviewed five additional visitors with the first half of the interview protocol. I expected that visitors who watched the videos would successfully connect the process, product and the artist and visitors who did not watch would focus on the objects in the exhibit. I also thought that the video watchers would connect to the artists and be able to talk about them and the traditions in more detail than the non-watchers. Some of the information I did not know and was hoping to get out of the study were visitors' viewing habits and the reasons behind them as well as what elements in the carefully constructed videos that visitors responded to or did not. This information has major implications for other museums who are considering different technologies or media to accomplish their interpretive goals. One of the major decisions for the design of this study was to interview visitors in groups, particularly families visiting the exhibit.. As family groups are a large portion of the visitors to many museums, I hoped that this study would illuminate the experiences of this particular population. Method Participants. For this study, I interviewed twenty adult visitors over the age of 18 for the general experiences portion of the interview protocol and I systematically recruited both single adults and adults in groups as they exited the main gallery of the MSU Museum. In the full-interview group of fifteen in which the videos were in place, there were four single adults visiting alone, two adult couples, three single adults with children and two couples with children. The five visitors who did not see the videos were one couple, one single adult and two single adults with children. I approximated the ages of the interview participants to range from 19 to 70 years old. The visitors were interviewed at different times of the day as well as during different days during the week and on weekends in an effort to include a diverse group of visitors. Procedure. The main gallery of the Michigan State University Museum was chosen as the focus for the interviews because it offered seating nearby and it was the only gallery at the MSU Museum or the Kresge Art Museum which included both female and male artists and it featured diverse aesthetic traditions as well. I recruited the first adult or group of adults who exited the gallery after I was ready to begin the interviews. Subjects were informed that the interviews were voluntary and could be terminated at any time and then they were asked if they would mind being audio-taped. All of the subjects were audio taped and one of the fifteen full interviews was cut short because of a recorder malfunction. At the completion of the interview, subjects were given a set of artist profiles for taking part in the interview. After I finished the interview and field notes, I recruited the next adult or group exiting the gallery. Fifteen of the visitors were interviewed while the exhibit was fully in place and five were interviewed after the video interpretation had been removed just prior to the exhibit's closing. All of the participants were asked questions about the general nature of their experience in an effort to draw out their reflections without specifically prompting for talk about the video interpretation. The fifteen visitors who were interviewed when the videos were in place then were asked to reflect on the role of the video interpretation in their experience. Results The videos: Connecting process, product and artist. Perhaps the most significant and gratifying finding from this study is that the videos were apparently successful in helping the visitors who watched them to connect the individual artists with their creative traditions and the objects that they made. As mentioned previously, the exhibition team set out to break stereotypes of African creative traditions by using videos to present this balanced interpretive approach. In traditional exhibits featuring African art, the emphasis is generally on the objects chosen to satisfy Western aesthetics and the artists and the traditions remain in the background if addressed at all. Of the fifteen visitors who were interviewed while the videos were in place, three made this connection between the process, the product and the artist in the general section of the interview and eight others described this particular relationship in the video-specific section, all without prompting. A 70-year-old woman had this to say,
Many visitors also felt that this connection between process, product and artist created a context of meaning for them; why the tradition is important to that culture:
Several visitors emphasized the importance of seeing the artists make the objects which were actually featured in the exhibit:
For the exhibition team, a key piece of this three-part relationship was the apparent inclusion of the artists in sharp contrast to the faceless, anonymous artist stereotype. Many visitors felt the videos made the artists "real" people and that they personalized the exhibit. In fact, seven of the fifteen used those very words to describe the videos as did this young woman in her 20's, "I think just because it [the video] does make it more real. The people are real people and not just somebody across another part of the world." A woman with two young children explained,
Several visitors took the metaphor of the artists as "real people" a step farther: "it was like her telling her own story and then it was an interpreter. It was kind of like pretending that person was there visiting and telling about what they made - not someone else telling about her," said a woman with two young children. Her husband added, "It's almost like having a guided tour - you know 'I [emphasis added] make these things and this is how I make them.'" Similarly, a woman with a small boy noted that
Effective elements of the videos. That visitors felt the videos helped them imagine they were having conversations with the artists or that they were real people with families and stories to tell begs the question of what elements in the videos engendered those feelings. Nine of the fifteen visitors reported that they responded to the first-person narrative format of the videos. For example, one woman in her early 20's reported that she didn't "watch" the videos but was attending to the parts of the audio track while she was looking at the objects in the exhibit, "I was just listening when they were talking about their lives, not the basket itself type of thing. You can hear them saying what they [emphasis added] think, it's not someone else." Two additional visitors who watched the videos also focused on the artists' stories:
The exhibition team and I expected that visitors would connect strongly to the first-person stories and there is evidence that visitors particularly like a narrative format in video as shown in a study of the live video presentations at the Monterey Bay Aquarium (Connor, 1991). Other visitors mentioned elements that would be difficult to get from text or photographs as exemplified in this comment from a man with middle school-aged-children:
A man in his 60's reported that he appreciated the video's ability to zoom in and out through different shots,
Five visitors felt that the videos were effective by placing the artists and the objects in a current time context. Two visitors illustrate this point especially well:
Another woman in her late 30's with a small boy mentioned several of the elements together:
One last component of the videos seems very simple yet it has great impact on whether the videos are watched or not. All of the videos were about two minutes in length and they repeated in loops. Five of the fifteen visitors specifically mentioned the length as one man in his 40's explained, "I liked them because they're only two minutes - you don't have to stand there for ten minutes or half an hour - they're real compact and you get a good idea of what you're looking at." A 30-year-old woman with two children added, "I liked that they were short, because I looked at it [the label on the monitors] and it was only like two minutes and I said, 'Ok, I have time for two minutes.' But if it had said 15..." Viewing habits. Even with so much evidence pointing to the videos as an effective interpretive strategy, they are useful only if visitors engage them. As indicated previously, the two-minute time length played an important role for several visitors as they were making decisions about viewing the videos. Two of the fifteen visitors reported that they did not "watch" the videos. One woman in her early 20's listened to parts of the videos that interested her but didn't watch because "I don't like standing still that long, I was listening so that I didn't have to stand there and watch." A man in his 30's with a six-year-old girl reported that he did not watch any of the videos but listened in the back of his mind and knew that they were interviews with the artists. He didn't know how long the videos were and he described his visiting preferences, "Usually we'll go through here [the Museum] in about 15 to 30 minutes....I didn't have time to sit down and watch them and I don't like sitting in one place - I like to just waltz through and leave." Other factors also affect visitors' reports of their viewing habits and chief among those is the presence of young children. Of the seven visitors with children who were interviewed before the videos were removed, four of them reported that they didn't watch as much of the videos as they would like and cited their children as the reason. A woman with a three-year-old explained, "I didn't have a chance to watch them but just catching a glimpse...maybe if I had a chance I would know more but this little guy..." One visitor had children of middle-school age and didn't mention that they hindered her viewing. The other two visitors with children toured the gallery when only one of the videos was playing and they reported that the other videos were rewinding in their loop cycle. On the other end of the spectrum were two visitors who wished that the videos were much longer and they enjoyed watching them several times over. Visitors also showed great variance in how they watched the videos. Some only listened sporadically, others caught glimpses, and several people watched each video several times through. Visitors cited several factors which influenced their viewing habits including other people in the group, time constraints on the visit, level of interest and naturally, the nemesis of electronic technology, whether the videos were playing or not. Comparing the two groups: with and without the videos. I noticed many similarities and differences in the answers to the first section of the interview which was given to visitors in both conditions, with and without videos. The first question on this general section of the protocol asked what visitors were thinking or feeling or doing as they were going through the exhibit and over half of the visitors were trying to imagine or visualize what it would be like to live in Ethiopia using their own culture as a reference point. "I was trying to visualize what it must be like in reality to be in that place compared to here, I guess feeling somewhat lucky I live here as opposed to there and also a little curious about what it would be like to experience life there," said a man in his 40's. And a woman of similar age: "I was trying to imagine living and making the baskets and using [italics added] them...to imagine myself doing that and it's very hard in our society." Several other visitors reported that they were curious about the objects and the materials of which they were constructed. An interesting pattern developed when several of the visitors were asked to elaborate on what parts of the exhibit helped them answer the previous two questions about an artist and the focus of the exhibit. Most of the visitors in both groups identified the visual interpretive media as being supportive: the videos, still photographs or the large photo-mural of the marketplace. The two groups differed, however, in their views of what the exhibit was about. Most of the visitors who saw the videos believed the exhibit was mainly about individual artists, how they made a living and the crafts that they produced. The answers of the visitors who didn't see the videos were more general in nature; they believed that the exhibit was about craftsmanship and Ethiopian culture as a whole instead of traditions practiced by individuals with names and families. Similarly, many of the visitors who saw the videos were able to provide detailed answers when asked to tell about an artist they remembered. A young woman about 20 years old was fascinated by the milk container maker: "I thought that it was something that she had to know how to make that before she could get married and also that she was married when she was fourteen! That's kind of young. And her mother taught her how to make the baskets when she was ten - and it was just so incorporated into her life." And a visitor in his 40's recalled the sorghum stalk model maker: "I don't remember his name but if I recall him he's standing next to them [the sorghum stalk models] trying to sell them to make money to go to school and take care of his folks." In contrast, only one of the five visitors who didn't see the videos remembered anything beyond the sex of the artist and the tradition he or she practiced. This particular visitor happened to read the printed artist's profile which remained on the viewing station after the monitors had been removed. The final difference between the visitors in the two conditions was not a comparison of answers to a single question, but rather emerged through the answers that they gave to other questions in the interview protocol. Museum professionals know that visitors bring a wide array of experiences to an exhibit and sometimes these experiences help them connect to or engage the exhibit on a personal level. In an exhibit which features the products of creative traditions, you would expect that visitors who have actually made baskets or pottery or models would have an important avenue for understanding: this was the case for several visitors. However, two visitors mentioned that the videos helped them connect from a perspective other than that of having created similar objects in the past. A man in his 60's who was an engineer by profession, remembered the model maker because he wanted to make money to go to school and become an architectural engineer. The other visitor, a woman in her 30's volunteered, "it was actually in the videos and how they were made, it seemed very real to me and I'm more of a feeling type learner versus an intellectual....I'm not saying everybody connects that way but that's the way I think it becomes meaningful....you know, one of them's a mother and I'm [emphasis added] a mother." These two visitors "connected" with the artists because they shared similar roles in their lives and they discovered these similarities through the video interpretation. Summary and Conclusion The results of the interviews indicate that the balanced interpretive approach of presenting the process, the product and the artist was indeed successful in breaking through the stereotypical presentation of African creative traditions for those visitors who engaged the videos at some point. Many visitors identified the videos as the key piece of interpretation which helped them connect the traditions with the displayed objects and the artists who created them. Several of those visitors talked about the artists as real people who had identities and families and who cared about the tradition that they practiced, thus presenting strong evidence that the artists were successfully integrated into the exhibit. Even though this study was not originally designed to include two conditions, the results from the five comparative interviews without the videos provide some evidence that those visitors viewed the exhibit in more general terms and that the artists as individuals played a lesser role. However, five cases is small for a representative sample and the information gained should be considered in perspective. The caveat to the good news for the balanced interpretive approach is that visitors have to take advantage of interpretive media in order for it to be effective. This study provides strong evidence that there are "ideal museum visitors" who have few constraints on their time and who do engage the various forms of interpretive media which has been so carefully crafted by exhibition teams. However, the interviews also indicate that it is common for families with small children to enjoy "abbreviated" visits. Connor (1991) noted a similar pattern for a live video program at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. There are also visitors who "don't like to watch TV" or read labels indicating that personal preferences for interpretive media also play a role. Even though several visitors had shortened experiences with the video interpretation, thirteen of the fifteen visitors interviewed engaged the videos on some level and many quite deeply. Judging from the abundance of data from visitors with children whose visits were cut short, it seems that the videos do offer a lot of information in a small amount of time. In fact, the majority of visitors with children reported that if they were able to take advantage of the interpretive media provided, they watched the videos. A closer look at the videos revealed that the first-person narrative format appeared to be the strongest of the video elements which affected visitors' perceptions and the evidence to support that claim was quite rich. It may be that visitors naturally respond to the narrative format in a manner which Bruner (1985) described. Whatever the draw to the first-person narratives, they appeared to be quite powerful. Additionally, the attempt to incorporate both context and detail by changing camera angles and the short length of the videos (with accompanying labels) contributed favorably to visitors' experiences. Of course, motion video is uniquely suited to show the creative process and many visitors remarked that they were quite interested to see and to know how the objects they encountered were created. Here again, it is important to note that the focus of this study was an interpretive strategy, not the video technology itself. The use of the videos in this particular interpretive strategy was successful primarily because the exhibition team articulated the goals for the exhibit first and then chose to create the interpretive technology which would best achieve them. Another museum could combine all the elements which worked in this instance and still not have an effective form of interpretation if there is not a match between goals and the careful and judicious use of interpretive media. This study clearly adds to the understanding of visitor experiences, particularly those of families with children, in an exhibit which sought to interpret the creative threads of a culture through a balanced interpretive approach. Furthermore, this research has also contributed to the use of technology in informal settings, particularly as it is viewed from the perspective of visitors.
References Bruner, J. (1985). Narrative and paradigmatic modes of thought. In E. Eisner (Ed.), Learning and teaching: The ways of knowing (pp. 97-115). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Cerny, C. (1990, January/February). Collecting Folk Art. Museum News, 58-62. Chadbourne, C. (1991, March/April). A tool for storytelling. Museum News, 39-42. Connor, J. L. (1991). Promoting deeper interest in science. Curator, 34 (4), 245-260. Rabinowitz, R. (1991, March/April). Exhibit as canvas. Museum News, 34-38. Robbins, W. M. (1994, September/October). Interpreting African Art. Museum News, 36-41. Snyder-Grenier, E. & Caldwell, B. (1992, May/June). Voices of History. Museum News, 56-59. Volkert, J. W. (1991, March/April). Monologue to dialogue. Museum News, 46-48.
Interview Guide General Experiences 1. Every visitor experiences exhibits differently. Imagine that you are watching a video of yourself going through this gallery, can you describe what you were thinking, doing or feeling? 2. How would you describe this exhibit to someone who hasn't seen it yet?
More Specific Experiences 3. What sticks out in your mind most when you think about the exhibit?
4. What can you tell me about an object that you remember looking at in the exhibit? 5. Was there anything in the exhibit that was helpful to you or enhanced your experience? 6. Do you remember any of the artists?
Focus on Video 7. I am trying to understand why the videos might be different than photographs or labels and I would like to learn what you thought about the use of videos in the exhibit. Was there a particular video that you liked? 8. What did you like most about this video?
9. Did the video(s) influence the way you looked at or interacted with the objects which are displayed in the exhibit?
10. There were four videos in this gallery. Did you watch some or all of the videos?
11. Why did you watch (all of the videos) or (just some of the videos?) 12. The last few questions that I have asked focus on the videos in the exhibit which is really the heart of my research. I have a hunch that videos enhance visitors’ experiences but it is not clear why. From your experience with the videos just now, can you think of why the videos were helpful to you? 13. I have one last question and it is about something more general. What did you learn about Ethiopia from the exhibit?
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| 1994 exhibit overview | |