Across the way, running down the gallery's right-hand wall,
are six glassed-in cabinets filled with artifacts - objects,
paintings, documents, drawings, - pertaining to Hamilton's
life. These, too, are arranged thematically: IMMIGRANT / SOLDIER
/ LAWMAKER / ECONOMIST / ACTIVIST / VISIONARY. They are meant
to represent the Past and to lay out Hamilton's Vision. As
the N-YHS web site explains, "Cases on the righthand
wall display objects - a musket, money, slave shackles - illustrating
his concepts."
Between Past and Present, laid out on individual platforms
running down the center of the hall, are thirteen documents,
most written by Hamilton. These, presumably, are the words
by which Modern America was Made flesh.
It's not easy to see these words, or much of anything else,
as the entire gallery has been deliberately kept murky, partly
to preserve delicate documents, partly because the design
prioritizes the video screens, making the eighteenth century
material even harder to see. (The screens' oscillating intensity
- they glow more brightly when the film snippets cycle on
- further disorients would-be readers, though the moments
of gloom-lightening brightness do provide the best opportunities
for maneuvering about the sepulcher.)
It's hard to fathom why the docu-centric underwriters acquiesced
in sacrificing the legibility of prized and supposedly featured
manuscripts. Unless, perhaps, the documents aren't meant to
be read at all - reviewers have been dumbfounded by the absence
of transcriptions - but rather to serve as relics of the Hero.
Could the real point of the little altars and the somber atmosphere
be to inculcate an appropriately reverential attitude? That
may be - it's certainly in keeping with the hagiographical
quality of the entire exercise - but I think an examination
of the show's depiction of the Past, and its rendition of
the Present, will afford a better explanation of why the Then
has been subordinated to the Now.
-2-
Extracting Hamilton's Vision from the six cases of the Past
is impeded by more than dim wattage. The artifacts in each
cabinet are numbered from left to right. But the natural pedestrian
flow runs down the long wall from right to left. Attentive
visitors leapfrog each case from right to left and then double
back, only to collide head on with guests plowing straight
ahead, either because they don't care about proceeding in
proper order, or at least as likely, because they haven't
been able read the numbered captions. These have been placed
a scant two feet above the floor, a serious burden for those
with bad eyes or bad backs. "The sight of visitors leaning
over like feeding storks is a common one," one reviewer
has noted; I've spotted gamely determined attendees crouching,
kneeling, even sitting in an effort to make out the text.
Fledgling curators usually get inoculated against such elementary
errors of craft in Museology 101. They also get warned off
jumbling together authentic period pieces with materials produced
a hundred or more years after the events they depict, as is
done here routinely. 18th century artifacts mingle promiscuously
with 19th or 20th century depictions fashioned during centennial
celebrations or Colonial Revivals. Museums usually treat such
items as illustrative of the temper of the times in which
they were created, rather than evidence about the period under
examination.
Whatever their provenance, the objects are presented virtually
without context, apart from wisps of text, and in a few instances
an Acoustiguide elaboration. It's assumed they can speak for
themselves. This is all the more frustrating as they are burdened
not only with evoking Hamilton's life but elucidating his
"concepts," and how much "concept" can
an unexplicated musket convey? Nor do the cases provide a
narrative thread to string the isolated pieces together, weaving
them into a larger story; nor are the cases connected one
to the other. Rothstein refers in his review to "the
sheer accumulation of artifacts and portraits" as being
one of the exhibit's few achievements, but what we really
have here is a "mere" accumulation, scattered bits
of evidence in search of an argument.
These sins of omission, however, are decidedly preferable
to the sins of commission that can occur when curatorial interventions
do take place, of which I'll give just one example.
The text and Acoustiguide declare that Hamilton as Secretary
of the Treasury "found a way to pay off America's lingering
war debts" - and to pay them "fairly" [my emphasis]
- over the "bitter objections of less progressive opponents."
By the time he retired in 1795, it's claimed, Hamilton had
brought the nation "into the modern financial era";
forestalled the possibility of its becoming a "banana
republic"; and left it "poised to become a major
financial power." Setting aside the final preposterous
assertion - under any reasonable construction of "poised"
it's off by roughly a century - this package of propositions,
presented as self-evident truths, coolly finesses the hottest
debate of the 1790s, one that nearly tore the fledgling Republic
apart.
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