The Language of Contextualism and Essentialism in Museum Education

This paper proposes that studies of social interaction as situated activity may shed light on processes of meaning making in contemporary art museums and inform the development of new museum technologies. It is argued that a sociocultural perspective on the pervasive 'meaning culture ' in museums makes apparent the interplay between situated discourses and the ideological constructs that guide them. Such insight into the workings of embodied interaction may be useful for the development of technology that supports, mediates and creates the effects of immediacy and the move toward a 'presence culture'. Art museum research frequently revolves around problems related to traditional distinctions in aesthetics, between what may be call essentialist and contextualist positions. Briefly stated, essentialists argue that contextual information, in principle, distracts from and undermines unmediated somatic knowledge that is crucial to the aesthetic encounter: a non-linguistic, intuitive response to the sensual characteristics of artworks. In the development of digital mediating devices, such concern with aesthetic effects is expressed in the concept of embodied interaction (Dourish 2001) and a theoretical focus that Gumbrecht calls 'presence culture ' (Gumbrecht 2004). Contextualism, on the other hand, has to do with hermeneutics and art history: a concern with language systems that mediate this disciplinary knowledge in order to construct meaning. The contextualist tradition, or 'meaning culture, ' is today not so concerned with ‘what does it mean ’ in the classical hermeneutic sense as with ‘how does it mean.’ Ultimately, tensions between contextualist and essentialist positions may perhaps explain why the concept of learning in art museums operates mostly a vague construct (Knutso