Miscellaneous

Museum of Tolerance / Huntington Botanical Gardens

By jeremyblachman

My girlfriend was out in LA with me this past week, and we did two touristy things -- we went to the Huntington Botanical Gardens, and to the Museum of Tolerance.  First, the gardens.  They're very pretty.  They're not far from Pasadena, in what looked like (and Wikipedia confirmed) a very wealthy suburb called San Marino.  Houses very big, set back from the street, very quiet and residential.  The gardens are in the middle of a residential neighborhood, and it's acres and acres of plants, divided into an Australian garden, a Chinese garden, a Japanese garden, a Cactus garden, a Jungle garden, a Rose garden, and probably a couple of others that I can't remember.  We were the youngest people there, with the exception of the little tiny people who probably didn't have a choice because the bigger people who feed them forced them to come.  It was pretty, but I couldn't help but keep thinking that a botanical garden is like a zoo that's been evacuated.  I kept hoping to turn the corner and see some animals.  We saw a lizard and some ducks, but only incidentally.  I know plants are alive, but they're just not very lively.  I felt bad for the plants which aren't part of any of the gardens but are just on the paths between the gardens.  Like, if you're setting up a botanical garden, it must be hard to choose which plants are going to line the paths.  Because if they were really awesome plants, you'd want to make them part of one of the gardens.  Yet if they were completely pointless, you wouldn't want them there at all.  On the other hand, it makes no sense for me to feel bad for any of the plants, since they're plants, and almost certainly don't have feelings.  Unless we know a lot less about plants than we think we do.  In any case, the botanical gardens are highly recommended if you like that sort of thing.

I give the Museum of Tolerance a B-minus, although when I was telling a friend about it, and then told him that grade, he said it sounded to him like I was being generous.  Just semantically, the Museum of Tolerance should really be called the Museum of the Holocaust, because that's the main exhibit, and other issues of intolerance in the world, past or present -- genocides in Darfur, the Japanese internment camps, racism, slavery, etc etc etc -- are hardly touched on if at all.  There were two exhibits besides the Holocaust one, both clearly quite secondary for the museum.  One was about knowing your family history and ethnic heritage, with videotaped pieces from celebrities like Joe Torre and Billy Crystal, talking about their relatives.  Which is fine, but isn't really about tolerance, or if it is I didn't quite see the link.  Joe Torre, as far as I know, is not a victim of oppression.  The other exhibit was about farm workers, who may in fact be oppressed, but the museum was closing and we didn't get a chance to check that one out.  In any case, it clearly plays second or third fiddle to the Holocaust exhibit, which is the main attraction. 

My superficial problem with the Holocaust exhibit was that it's not self-directed at all -- you're put in a group and you follow along an audio tour that plays from loudspeakers above you -- the narrator says something, something lights up on the wall, a picture or a video, you look or watch while you listen, and then you are moved forward to the next set of loudspeakers.  Perhaps this is a good thing -- I tend to race through exhibits at most museums, and don't read all the placards, and probably don't get half as much out of it as I should.  But even if it's good for me, I kept feeling like the pacing was too slow here, I wanted to move faster, I wanted to get to the next thing before the exhibit wanted to let me.  But that's not my real problem.  At the start of the exhibit, you're given a card with a picture of a young person on it.  You put the card into a computer terminal and it shows you some information about your person -- she's from Germany, she was 11 years old in 1940, she had two brothers.  And then the narrator: "At the end of the tour, you'll find out if your child lived or died in the Holocaust."  Um, so it's a game show?  It just felt sort of glib for what was going on.  And superficial, kind of.  I wished they'd actually told me some more information about the child, let me feel some sort of emotional investment -- what did she like to do, what was her favorite color, what did she eat for breakfast, anything that felt more personal than a fuzzy out-of-focus picture and knowing she was from Poland.  And maybe give me more than the computer terminal at the beginning and then find out her fate at the end.  Make her a real part of the story.  Anyway.  The exhibit goes from Germany in the 1930s up until the end of the war.  The first room sets up how the exhibit works -- three narrator voices on the audio tour -- there's a "researcher," who gathers information, a "historian," who finds primary sources, and a "designer," who puts it all together into displays.  But it quickly becomes muddled and there's no real distinction between any of these voices, and it's unclear why this framing device is needed when really it's just a narrated tour.  And then it does a decent job of tracing the sequence of events, from Hitler's rise to the Jews being persecuted, to the death camps, to the allies coming together to fight the Germans.  The biggest weakness, I think, is that they somehow made something that happened only 60 years ago feel like ancient history.  There was nothing tying any of it to the present -- nothing to make anyone think about how this wasn't so long ago, our grandparents were alive back then.  It could have just as easily been the Peloponnesian War they were talking about.  No audio or video of survivors talking about what it was like, nothing to really draw anyone in and make it feel more personal.  So, for me, it was about a B-minus.

And it got me thinking about museums and how most of them really aren't any better than a B-minus.  And especially with the Internet and how much kids and not-kids can get from their computers at home -- most museum exhibits really aren't any better than what we can do on our computers.  And they should be.  And they could be.  If it were me -- without thinking too hard about this -- instead of the cards with the survivors and victims, I'd give out cards that said whether you were a German or a Jew, and split people up -- families, friends, cut in half, right at the beginning of the exhibit -- and then you're taken through a series of very different exhibits, the Germans experiencing the Nazi propaganda and seeing what it was like to go from peaceful co-existence with the Jews to being told they were the cause of the economic problems, etc, to Hitler's rise.  And on the Jewish side of the exhibit it's almost like the reverse of a fun house -- from out of nowhere, the sound of broken glass, screaming, you're forced onto a train, taken down the hall, locked in a small room.  And then the German side, on the other side of the gate, is forced to push buttons, the sound of gunshots, etc.  Until you meet up again and switch places and experience the other side of the exhibit.  There are ways to do this that would be impactful -- perhaps not going as far as I'm suggesting, but there are tasteful, appropriate, impactful ways to do this that could beat what you can get from a history book or even the Internet.  And I just don't think this museum or most others really do that -- the information they're trying to present couldn't be more powerful, couldn't be more important -- and yet it just sort of feels flat and irrelevant and way in the past. 

I'm probably thinking too hard about this, but I figured I'd post my thoughts...

Full post as published by Jeremy Blachman's Brand New Weblog on April 28, 2008 (boomark / email).