Religious Offerings
The Proposal vs the Finished Project
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Religious Offerings is a site which presents some forty works from the National Gallery of Australia's collection of Asian art, each of which is accompanied by a short passage of text. Pages dealing more generally with the arts and religions of Asia are also included.
This passage will discuss the ways in which my finished project differs from my original proposal. Changes have been made both to the structuring of the data and to some of the themes I wished to pursue. I found that it was better to focus more on the works I was studying than try to include a whole lot of theoretical information of my own as well.
Firstly, I will look at the actual structuring of the project. The most obvious change here is with the arrangement of the works with their accompanying text. I initially planned to provide simply a listing of works with small GIF images, where clicking on the relevant GIF woul link to another page which held a larger JPEG version of the image with a passage of text about that particular work. This would have made the listing page huge and hard to follow. I found it more practical to group the images by country from the start and to put the text with the GIF image and have the link simply go to a larger JPEG. This seemed to be a better way of organising my pages.
Because of this amendment, I have created an index to the country pages which is linked from the Home page. Each country page is linked to every other one to allow for ease of travelling between pages.
I also have not provided a separate text listing of the works included, as I preferred to keep the cetegorisation more thematic in line with the discussion which runs through the whole project. Many religious themes, narratives and motifs are recurrent in works from several countries and so I thought it would be better to deal with the works not so much on their individual status ('the artist', for example is generally unknown and not important) but more as products of a given culture, to see how different countries interpreted the various themes. This may be an oversight; I will have to get some feedback from people in how well the site runs in this respect.
In terms of what information I have provided, there are several ways in which my final project differs from my proposal.
I had intended writing a short introduction at the head of each country page which would give an outline of artistic practice in that country. Instead, I have written a few lines about the pieces in the collection and their relevance to the theme of religion. I have used the pages which provide imported images and text to fill in this gap. Here, I have tried to find information which gives some sort of background to the arts of a given country, be it religious belief, cultural history, discussions of particular practices or even discussions of other specific works which have been interpreted in a relevant way. This separates out the works in the collection somewhat and keeps them as a defined group to be studied more as a self contained unit if required.
General issues regarding the arts of Asia are dealt with in the Introduction which appears in printed form in the catalogue to the collection and which I have reproduced on two pages within the project. It aims to bring some kind of cohesion between the countries of Asia and I think it achieves this far better than I could have done in short, defined passages on each country.
When discussing the amount and types of information provided by the Gallery, I wanted to go more into what implications this holds for the future of Asian art in an Australian Gallery context. I think I could have written a lengthy essay on this topic, but would perhaps have needed to draw on examples outside the National Gallery itself. For this reason, I curtailed this section of the text and broke it down into shorter discussions of the information provided and how the works are displayed in the Gallery. I think it would have detracted from the site as a study of artworks and perhaps even left a few people bored to tears with an overload of academic ramblings.
For similar reasons, I did not write on how the Gallery chooses works for acquisition or how the collection is funded. Again, I thought that it would be too far removed from my intention in making the site a discussion of the artworks themselves. Perhaps these topics could be explored on a separate site, along with the future of Asian art in Australian galleries as mentioned before. This would be a more academic site, designed for no younger than tertiary age students and gallery workers. I would have to have extensive consultation time with staff at several galleries to make a comprehensive study.
The staff at the National Gallery were quite happy to help me with any problems or questions I had, despite their initial concerns about copyright. Unfortunately, they expressed their lack of available time in working on the project, but perhaps this was a good thing because even though the site is devoted to the Gallery's collection, it has been written by an outsider with a more objective view. I would like to show Gallery staff my project and talk with them about their plans (if any) for launching new material on the Internet.
There are a few things I wish I could have done better on the project. One is the quality of the images. I took all the images of works in the collection from the Gallery's slides and some of them reproduced very poorly. Taking my own photos was unfeasible accounting for the fact that most of the works are in storage. A more uniform set of images would have given greater continuity and viewing ability.
I would also have liked more continuity in the imported text I have included, as it is a bit haphazard according to what was available. Nevertheless, the variety of types of text (religious texts, to political propaganda, to poetry...) can be seen positively, for its sheer diversity of opinion.
In technical terms, I would have liked to spend more time on the layout of my pages in terms of providing icons as links etc., except the one thing that really annoyed me about searching the Internet was the amount of waiting time I spent with image rich home pages that turned out to offer no more than pretty icons. I think that clear, easy to understand text still has its place as the most comprehensive mode of communication.
I hope the project is successful (all the links work, the images come up, it actually has something to say - the topics of my dreams for the last few weeks) and that the Gallery approves of the result.
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Jane Carter
20.10.95