Deconstructing the Museum: Part 1
A most excellent curatorial tutorial today pulled things in a totally unexpected - but possibly inevitible - direction, given the themes of deconstruction, subversion and metatextuality which have been at the forefront of things lately. It all started when we dismantled the glass display case to get some stones inside...and then we started moving things around... Currently it's all about utilising the space, and subverting the expectations of what a traditional museum ought to look like, even down to whether the explanatory texts ought to be placed alongside their corresponding exhibits - and in a sense also echoing early 20th Century criticism of Beowulf (which Tolkien confronts in his famous essay The Monsters & the Critics ) that the 'marginal elements' (i.e the monster fights and the dragon) are given centre-stage (because, obviously, any 'serious' epic must not trouble the reader with such trivia - despite the plethora of sea-monsters, one-eyed giants and