Thelen: [Feedback] Now why does it doing that, is it because the mics are too close to each other? That seemed to be… Franz
Thelen: That is pretty awesome. I mean I have heard of people trying to do solar. Staples
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Thelen: That is pretty awesome. I mean I have heard of people trying to do solar. Staples: That is what is going to be in our little room of eight foot or so. We have, our fourth floor apartment will be solar. Then the third, the second and the garage will be solar warmed. Thelen: Wow. Cool. Wow. Do you have to go out and hire, do you have to find a certain kind of contractor who will do that kind of work? Staples: The guy has been divine up to a point, wonderful. Thelen: The same one you are talking about now? Staples: Now he is a bit of a pain in the butt. Charles: You are on mic right, are we off mic right? Thelen: I can turn pause on, so we will start the recording back up at four-thirty Thursday. I mentioned the essay on how exhibit design is like theater using Aristotle’s six categories and you think it is the best thing you have written. Charles: I do. I think it is more analytically. I think it is talking more about the player. Exhibits, [pause] unlike movies and theater where there is a well-known structure of hierarchy and job responsibilities, i.e. producer, director, designer, script-writer, actor. Exhibits do not have that. It is one of the things that one might say that we have either struggled with or done well with. I have sort of explored it in a couple of other writings. If you say take the theater comparison, you could say the director of the museum or whoever is doing the fundraising, whoever is setting the overall agenda, they are the producer. They are hiring the other players, they are finding the funders, they are the one who is going to take the heat or not if there is great success and so on, so they are the producer. We could be compared to the designer and in many ways we are playing that role. The curator could certainly be compared to the script-writer. Whoever is producing the show could be the production manager, not producing, but the technical director, you know, there are all those people. But who is the director of an exhibit? Who is really calling the intellectual shots the way a director calls the intellectual shots of a play? Who is setting the aesthetic agenda for the designer and saying this is the mood I want? Who is the one talking to the script-writer and saying this is the point of view we want to get across at this point? Who is that person? I would say historically one could say it was the curator. The curator wrote the script but was also kind of thinking the big picture and even I think yesterday I talked a little bit. When we first looked at the Smithsonian, the script might even say, to the left will be, to the right will be, next you will see.
A lot of projects, it is just more amorphous and you just hope the relationship is really good, that that role just does not exist. The other problem is because of the traditional role designer and whatever limitations that has on it, one would never publicly say that the designer is the director of the project. Whereas the curator could be the director. There are certain just roles that it is assumed you are in that you may or may not be in. Thelen: The payoff of making the analogy of the theater and the director, where there clearly is a director, is to open up the question of - well on the one hand the role of the designer and the other hand, who is in fact assembling this? Charles: And to say in effect, our artifacts are actors and how do we make them come alive and how do we make this whole performance happen around them. The audience is not just looking at a pristine view also - they are wandering in and through it. I still think it is a fair analogy. I wrote it because our good friend Oscar Poush, who was the director of the theater museum in Vienna was retiring and as the Germans do, they were doing a festrif. I asked if I could write a piece for the festrif. I sort of set out the challenge for myself to write it. Thelen: Whoever is listening to this now or transcribing it, look for this paper it is really really good. I hope it is somehow going with the stuff. Charles: Well, copies will go with the stuff and also a printed copy of it in the book will go with the stuff. There are some other articles in this festrif in English, mostly it is in German. I was very honored too that they would accept it without all the degrees after my name that it should have. Thelen: Frau, professor, doctor. Never mind. Charles: Well that was the fun, anyway. Thelen: We have to do Chicago. Charles: Absolutely. Thelen: On state street that great street. Charles: This is why we are here. I am now looking at a review, volume seventy-six, number one, June 1989, the Journal of American History. Thelen: Oh my gosh, look at that. Charles: And Dave Thelen was the editor of this journal. At a party that Pete Daniel organized, Dave Thelen told me, you know it is in the usual Washington, what do you kind of question. Well, he had been Journal of - editor of this journal for many years and once he found out we did design work he said, “what was the first scholarly journal to ever publish a review.” Thelen: Which was not true, but anyway close enough. It is a story, make it up. Charles: I said, “oh, what was the first exhibit.” And David Thelen said, “it was We the People at the Chicago Historical Society and the scholar in charge was Al Young,” turned out it was a show that we had designed, so we bonded over drinks. Thelen: We did, over drinks and with Chicago in all of our minds. This exhibit, I cannot remember the review. Charles: Did you see it, the exhibit? Thelen: Oh I did, yes I did. Staples: He reviewed it, but did not see it. Thelen: Well, I did not review it. I mean I published the review. I do not remember, who wrote the review? Charles: The review is by - I do not know some parts are cut off. Let us see who signed it. Thelen: Oh my goodness, we certainly want to know, it should have been written at the end. Charles: Bernard Megin sent it to me. We the People, permanent exhibit - no it is not cut off. Barbara Clark Smith, I think. Wait a minute, let me see the end of this. Yes, Barbara Clark Smith. Thelen: So whoever did the review, you guys did the exhibit. Now let me say as I think we have established earlier in these conversations that this is an important exhibit for a number of reasons which are the emphasis on social history, ephemera, but you had been doing all this before. In history, I do not know what the reviewer said, but in the history world this drew a lot of attention as a new kind of history exhibit. End of track 1. Charles: She had worked at the history museum and she was hired to work with Al and I think help do a lot of the day-to-day run interference or whatever else. Staples: Well she had to do all of the sort of in-house curatorial stuff. Charles: Make all the arrangements for loans, et cetera. Al certainly after it - I think for Al it may have been a transformative experience. He was very excited. I know he did a lot of talks and some writings afterwards about the experience. Thelen: He did, I mean he was a crucial player in getting scholars to think about what are the rights of curators and it played later into the Enola Gay. In that period from this exhibit, he was - he talked a lot about what it was to be involved in working with you guys to start with. Charles: We have not seen these writings. Interestingly, a week or two before I met you Dave, I was up in Carlyle talking to Matt Pincer, the historian working on the Civil War project, and he said that he had been, when he was in graduate school at Oxford, he had read an article by this person Al Young and doing an exhibit called We the People and how it had influenced him to think about exhibits. Again I have not seen Al’s articles, we probably should collect them, try and get them for this archive. Thelen: Yes, I think so. Charles: You know, because it is interesting from the academic point of view that this is a very pivotal exhibit. Staples: A seminal work. Thelen: Yes, but it is. Charles: It does really - you know it did really focus on individual people and working people. I think that it is the first time in one of our exhibits we ever did little bios. Fifteen people were picked, sounds a little bit like Monticello, why did we say fifteen? Thelen: I am trying to remember that, remind me. Charles: Portrait of Patriot we called them. Some of them you would say, “is that really a patriot,” but that was a good issue too, I think. For each of them the museum had to have an artifact. We may or may not have a picture of the person also. For instance… Thelen: Sounds like Monticello. Charles: Cuffy, the black ship owner, captain who actually helped repatriate, not repatriate, but take, colonize slaves back to Liberia. He was one of them. They had a print of his ship and of him. The Prophet was one of the them, Tecumseh’s brother, the Prophet. I am blanking. The black woman poetrist, 18th century and her picture, her engraving is on, no I have a notebook of all of them. Thelen: We do not need to go through each of them. Charles: In each of them there is a little write-up about the person. Staples: Paul Revere was one of them. Charles: Paul Revere was one of them. They had one of his pieces of silver. Staples: His print of the Boston Massacre. Charles: Was it the print of the Boston Massacre? They had a guy, so-and-so, his pike, let us say John Smith, but it was a beau-Revolutionary War Pike. Staples: Powder horn. Charles: Powder horn all with carvings. They did enough work to research it to be pretty sure they had the right guy and who was he and so on. These were scattered throughout the show. I think what we found particularly fascinating was for the opening was they invited descendants of these people. I think they found direct descendants of about eight of them. There was a pile of Cuffys there, even a couple from Liberia. That was cool. Bob says do not cool, a stupid thing to say. Staples: I know, I know. Thelen: Alright, you should have told me that a couple of hours ago. Charles: That probably was the first time in an exhibit that we worked on. I mean we had focused on people. We had people in America on Stage as performers and so on and so forth. This was different the way Al wanted to present them. Thelen: Did you talk with Al about all this? Would you meet with him? Staples: I imagine that we. Charles: We met with him a number of times. Sharon was not involved. Staples: Not Sharon, but I meant Terry probably spoke more to him about this. Charles: They worked daily. We just met when we came in to work on the show. Thelen: Was there a sense of this being… Staples: I do not know who was the genesis of the idea, I do not know that. Thelen: It emerged. Charles: I do not remember, it was not our idea, I do not think so. Thelen: It sounds like it could have been Al’s, but as you say it depends on what is in the historical society, in the museum. What about Skramstad ? Charles: If you say that is part of your challenge. He was not there then. This was under Ellsworth Brown. Harold had left in the early eighties and gone up to the Henry Ford Museum, Greenfield Village and he was the head there. So this was Ellsworth. I think they specifically hired us for that job just because they knew that we dealt well with documents and history stuff and all that kind of stuff. They had more of a design department than they had had previously. Their design department was also working hard on a Civil War exhibit, that was the one Eric Foner was working on with Libby. So that whole show was sort of a balance between, it was, I mean it opened for the anniversary of the Constitution. Staples: It was a transition to that gallery in the back. Charles: Well, that was the Civil War gallery. This was really, the first half I would say was Revolution and up to the Constitution and the second half was really Federalism and the young America you might say. Who are all these people making the young America, building the young America. Staples: Was that nice New Orleans picture in there? Charles: It is a great view looking west. Under all things man shall free - anyway it is an eight foot wide. It was painted right after the acquisition of the Louisiana Purchase. I know Al loved - we had a workman’s leather apron that was very rare to have a worker’s leather apron. You know it is interesting that this show is so important for probably non-design reasons. Thelen: It is important because scholars. Charles: It is a turning point for scholars and scholars’ involvement in museums. Thelen: Of course, you all had been working with scholars. Staples: I think it was my suggestion, maybe that is too bold. When we got to the Civil War, they did not have much. Charles: We did not do the Civil War. Staples: In that gallery we had that frieze. Charles: That is the Revolutionary War. Staples: Okay, the Revolutionary War. We did that frieze of battle scenes from like… Charles: They were all nineteenth century reenactments. Staples: Right, right because they did not have enough stuff. We took the top four feet of the gallery and made big photo blowups of conquest or conflicts. Charles: I think, I mean. I will confess that until - when we were first hoping where this archive stuff might go. We had a little short list of maybe ten exhibits with the hope that maybe someplace will take this little group. Then when first Matt Pincer mentions this show and you mentioned this show, it was not in the ten. I think from a design perspective we were more in love with Crossroads of Continents or Imperial Austria. Staples: This was a far more traditional show. Charles: Because? Charles: It just was. Thelen: You are just putting pictures on the wall. Staples: Yes, pretty much. We had to draw a group of people that were the people, We the People. Charles: In the front we had people. Staples: These were made up people, but from illustrations within that period of time. Charles: It was the first time that we had to do major casework for a Declaration and a Constitution so we had solved some very high security issues that we had not faced up to before. Staples: We got pretty tricky because we put the preamble or something like that in the glass and when you got up to read the document, it disappear and you could then see the document. Charles: The lights, we did not want any lights on the document if there was nobody looking at it. We have got the lights working, you are setting them off. It was good design in that way, but it was traditional looking. It had very nice wood handrails. Again Wallbigig can do beautiful woodwork so you are not going to do metal, you are going to do beautiful wood. Thelen: And this, but this was from your point of view also important because you used local contractors? Charles: Well we had used them before. I was certainly aware of the importance of Al. I always called Al the poster child for NEH. I knew he was going out and campaigning after this, which I think was very important. In terms of initially trying to look at the archives and say, well… First - also we thought it was more likely to go to a design place than a public history site. It was sort of a well - design wise what are the piece you want to go. I do not think the show is still up, I am sure it is not still up, but it was up for a long long time. Staples: I do not think it is probably up either because… Thelen: They have gone through a big change. Staples: A very big change. Thelen: A very big change. I do not recognize the stuff they were doing before and now. Charles: Well, here is a nice quote, this is sort of very Al Young, “the Declaration of Independence is displayed alongside the reminisces of a washerwoman who saw the British surrender at Yorktown and Elizabeth Ferguson’s petition to the government of Pennsylvania for the return of land confiscated when her husband sided with the British. Irony runs high. Visitors approach the elegantly display copy of the Constitution by way of the 1798 cartoon congressional pugilist, which depicts Matthew Young’s spitting tongs welding brawl in the House of Representatives and the Bill of Rights is around the corner from a poster advertising a thirty dollar reward for the return of Arch, a slave of yellow complexion who talks sensibly and artful.” Thelen: This sounds like this is from…go ahead what is this? Charles: This is Wall Street Journal. A good review. I am happy to, I will make you copies. That is when Wall Street Journal was doing very good reviews. I am not sure they do it anymore. Thelen: The conclusion of this review by Gail King is “We the People were and are a diverse bunch.” Charles: Message got across. Thelen: Message got across, exactly. It is crucial in that way too. So if it is not so interesting from a design point of view we should move on to something that is. Charles: Well, I think working with Al - you commented Dave that we had worked with scholars. You had worked with Redheffer on Mathamatica. I vaguely remember the fish guy coming in and out on the Aquarium, but I had not personally worked with him. I am not sure prior to this we had worked with a university scholar compared to a curator. [phone ringing] I think that separation is not so strong now. [phone ringing] Thelen: Say that again, I am sorry. Charles: As more and more history scholars moved into museums as an area to work both before and after this time, the separation of the difference of working with a university scholar versus a museum curator is maybe less different than it is now. It is also just so much more common that on different exhibits a scholar with specific expertise would be pulled into the project, nowadays. I think that we were very aware that this was a bit unique, having Al on this project. What I do not really know is when that essentially became a requirement of NEH. Having just said that Perry Dous, we worked with Perry Dous from the Chicago University, not, University of Illinois at Chicago on our very first project at Chicago in 1976. Al was not the first one, but he certainly was the one who campaigned. Staples: He was the memorable one. Thelen: He is the memorable one, there you go. Charles: Perry was memorable. Perry knew all the pubs, kind of local bar history. It is a good show and it is good that you all started reviewing them. This whole, I mean, having more serious reviews of exhibits. Over the years we have talked a lot about that problem and how should they get reviewed and do people understand if they are - maybe it does not matter but there certainly has been a lot of discussion about do reviewers understand the process or do they need to understand the process or does it only matter what the final result is? I think that that is true. It only matters in the end what your experience is when it is all done. Thelen: But still there is a question of what criteria should you use. Oh my goodness they have the wrong color buttons on that Civil War uniform. Accuracy, small points versus theme. Charles: Or even cost, materials, appropriate materials, et cetera. I do not know where to go much more on this one. Thelen: I do not know either, so we should go somewhere else, Franklin or where would you? Charles: Well, Franklin, I think for us, Franklin is particularly interesting, the process was interesting. We competed - we talked about Imperial Austria being a consortium of museums. This was also a consortium but only one of them potentially was going to receive the exhibit. It was a consortium of Philadelphia institutions to organize a show about Benjamin Franklin. It was the Library Company, the Philosophical Society, the Franklin Institute, the PMA, Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Archives of the University of Pennsylvania. Three of the institutions Franklin is involved in founding and two others have major holdings. They formed a tricentenniary commission to organize a major exhibit on Franklin and other events. The show was going to open at the Franklin Institute. It was going to be a big traveling show, like eight thousand square feet or so. There was a competition and we were ultimately selected. It was obvious from the beginning that they were not quite sure what they wanted. When the two finalists are Staple and Charles, who some people would consider more traditional museum designers - I do not know that that is a fair description - but the other was Ed Scholberg of New York who is almost all interactive and AV and so on. 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