The aim of this article is to trace some lines of thinking towards a conceptualization of the uniqueness of the creative work of museums, the mode of creativeness that belongs exclusively to museums, or at least that museums are capable of by virtue of the types of materials and forms as well as activities unique to what will be referred to as museography. This is linked to the question of what it is that constitutes the uniqueness of museum work as (...) a professional field. The article characterizes the uniqueness of museum professional knowledge primarily in terms of a mode of creativeness, or bricolage in Levi-Strauss’s sense, mediated through the museographic form, and applied to the chance assemblies of materials to generate museum-specific modes of engaging questions—across science, culture, and society—particularly through creating unique temporal arrangements, or durations, that provoke thought, learning, and engagement on museographic terms. Museography’s originality, it is argued, consists in a bricolage that works through the museum’s unique material and form to create learning resources and encounters, museographic assemblages that depart from a conception of linear time as the space of evolutionary narrative to facilitate the experience of Bergsonian durations. (shrink)

Whether in the growing awareness of the origins of supermarket meat or the emergence of meat art, carnality appears to be something increasingly under question. Yet, despite meat carrying connotations that offer provocative connection with feminist concerns regarding the body, consumption and the cultural representation of women, meat consciousness has been only sporadically explored in existing feminist theory. Struck, however, by the comparisons between the dissected Body Worlds corpse and the filleted flesh of meat that are levelled most particularly at (...) female bodies on display, I examine in my article the bodily relations constructed in the Body Worlds exhibition by positioning the Body Worlds cadaver as a grotesque ‘meaty’ body under the broader rubric of the Bakhtinian carnivalesque. Within such webs of alimentary exchange, pleats of meaty matter may bring about localised eruptions of traditional and bodily engagements – including that of the gendered gaze – that entwine the possibility of pleasure, wonder and fascination into each act of inter-bodily engagement. Through this entrance into the very bowels of Body Worlds, my article ultimately asks what, as a feminist, it means to become meat conscious. (shrink)