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Reading beyond the Museum

THE RESONANT exhibition inspires and extends the capable mind; experiences of depth and power make us want to read and know more. Once engaged, we cannot easily turn away. When we use a museum well, our mind is given over, opened up, to the museum, if only for the time it takes for us to see the collected evidence. If that powerful, resonant moment might extend beyond the museum in ways that are easy to inspire-ways of readingthe great museum could become the instrument for learning it has too rarely been. When it is successful, reading in museums does not simply tell us about the world that stands beyond the museum; reading is in itself a surrogate experience of the world, a process of thought, interaction, and relationship that implicates us first into the life of the object before us and then into the larger world where it began. By reading a generative label or wall text, the museum user is compelled to consider the logic and wholeness of something that cannot be present but is represented by something that is perpetually present in the object or the specimen. The fossil frond invokes the lost fern. In any museum, an invocational reading-or any museum experience that implies the reality of a voice, a story, or an original contexthas cognitive consequences. Wolfgang Iser, theoretician of what happens in readers' minds, writes, ''As the reader passes through the various perspectives offered by the text, and relates the different views and patterns to one another, he sets the work in motion, and so sets himself in motion, too."' Reading sends the mind elsewhere, beyond what is here. This article considers reading as an opportunity to sustain the extended themes and values of the museum beyond the experience itself. The museum provides models, templates, or frames for understanding and reading the worldly systems beyond it. Its stories, patterns, and continuities provide the basis for seeing and reading our own interior experiences and insights, as we interpret them in relationship to larger narratives. And reading itself-actual engagements with texts on walls and in hands, and conversations among other readers about those engagementsholds the potential for deepening the gifts of energy, attention, and presence brought into the museum by its users.