Museum Storage and Meaning

Tales from the Crypt

Mirjam Brusius, Kavita Singh, Mirjam Brusius, Kavita Singh

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351659420
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Museum Studies

Beyond their often beautiful exhibition halls, many museums contain vast, hidden spaces in which objects may be stored, conserved, or processed. Museums can also include unseen archives, study rooms, and libraries which are inaccessible to the public. This collection of essays focuses on this domain, an area that has hitherto received little attention. Divided into four sections, the book critically examines the physical space of museum storage areas, the fluctuating historical fortunes of exhibits, the growing phenomenon of publicly visible storage, and the politics of objects deemed worthy of collection but unsuitable for display. In doing so, it explores issues including the relationship between storage and canonization, the politics of collecting, the use of museum storage as a form of censorship, the architectural character of storage space, and the economic and epistemic value of museum objects. Essay contributions come from a broad combination of museum directors, curators, archaeologists, historians, and other academics.

1
Introduction

Mirjam Brusius and Kavita Singh

‘It’s morally wrong to hold on to things you simply can’t show. If you can’t show our heritage, return it to us.’ These were the words with which Balraj Khanna, an Indian-origin, UK-based artist attacked the V&A in 1988 for displaying less than 5 per cent of its vast holdings of Indian art in its galleries. At the time, Khanna’s demand stirred up an enormous controversy, inspiring a storm of articles in the British and the Indian press. Questions were even raised in the Indian parliament. For a time, it seemed that the V&A’s right to hold on to its collection of Indian artefacts – the largest outside of India – would be formally challenged by the Indian government.¹

Implicit in Khanna’s criticisms, and in the writings of the many (mostly Indian) journalists and politicians who echoed his arguments,² was an assumption about the function of a museum: that it performs its duty only when it puts its objects on display. In Khanna’s view, when the museum kept its collections in storage it was guilty of a dereliction of its duty. Storing was hoarding; it betokened the museum’s neglect and callousness towards the objects in the collection, as well as a lack of accountability towards the public.

Khanna’s view is a popular one. Audiences everywhere have often expressed anger, frustration or suspicion towards museums that keep artefacts out of the public view. But the fact is that there are few museums that are able to put the entirety of their collections on view, or even intend to do so. In museums with small collections, the ratio of stored objects to displayed ones may not be very large; but in major museums across the world, displayed items can account for as little as 2 per cent of the collection as a whole.³

Why do so many museums have so many things that they do not show? Why do museum displays account for such a small fraction of their collections? What are these behind-the-scene spaces like, where the vast majority of museum objects are kept, and what purposes do they serve, and for whom? What happens to these objects in the storage, and what do stored objects ‘do’?

This volume hopes to shine a light on the ‘dark side of the moon’ of the museum world, to understand the history, the politics, the economics and indeed the poetics of museum storage. To do so, we have invited museum curators and directors, as well as museum studies scholars, cultural theorists and archaeologist observers to recount their reflections upon and encounters with the museum’s storage areas. Some contributors wrote about their own experiences as they took care of the reserve collections or explored or organised the storage areas of their museums. Others chose to discuss broader trends and problems in museum storage, and to historicise and theorise about the unknown realms of museums and the millions of objects that never come into public view. It soon became clear to us that the problems, challenges and serendipitous pleasures of the museum store were an important part of the workaday lives of those who laboured in museums, but these were seldom seen as experiences to be articulated in public.

While practical and technical guides for museum storage have been published for decades,⁴ studies that explicitly examine museum storage through an analytical – theoretical, philosophical, ethical – lens are still rare, if not absent. Notwithstanding a few publications on storage⁵ and the general and increasing interest (in particular in anthropology and history of science) in museum practices and the processes that lie behind gallery displays and exhibitions, the fast-growing fields of museum history, museum studies and the history of collecting, which aim to analyse the politics of the museum have tended to read the museum through its display, rather than through its capacity to hold and store a variety of objects which might seldom or never be shown. And in spite of a recent trend towards more critical approaches to museums (e.g. through issues of repatriation), these histories of display have long told mainly triumphalist stories about the structured, purposeful, strategic process of gathering of things according to a system, the features of which are clearly defined. This kind of discourse distorts the museum in many ways: it ignores the fact that museums do not just consist of exhibition halls but of vast hidden spaces; it leaves millions of objects out of our museum histories; and last, it presents the museum as an organised and stable space, in which only museological ‘results’ are visible, not the intermediate stage of their coming into being. As a result, not an aspect of museums and collections that is not only physically large, but is also historically, epistemologically and semantically important, has been eliminated from discussions about museums until lately.

In the pages that follow, we will set the scene for this topic and explain why we think storage matters in museum studies and museum history. We will outline the major questions raised by this theme, and whenever possible, we will link these to individual chapters in this book. At times, however, the questions that interest us, and the lines of enquiry they suggest, go beyond the rich harvest of case studies gathered in this volume. The sections in our introduction therefore are not congruent with the four parts along which the chapters of this book are organised. We have chosen to allow ourselves a more expansive exploration of the themes and provocations raised by the topic of museum storage in our prefatory essay, and the organising principle of the book will be explained briefly at the end of this introduction.

The inverse of display

Let us begin our exploration of museum storage by considering its ‘other’, i.e. display. Why is it that, when most museum objects lie in storage, it is the gallery and the exhibition that have come to take such an important place in both the self-representation of museums and the public’s perception of these institutions?

Perhaps a major reason why display is so prominent in the discourses of and by museums lies in the political history of the institution. Museums as we know them today are a product of the forces of democracy: they take treasures that had once been available exclusively to political or intellectual elites, and make them accessible to all. By turning private treasure into public goods, museums show themselves to be dedicated to the principles of citizenship and democracy. If the Louvre in Paris offers the most dramatic example of a royal palace seized in the name of the people and turned into a museum, then other royal collections (such as the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna or the Hermitage in St Petersburg) opened themselves to the people to anticipate and pre-empt a similar fate.

Since the museum effects a symbolic redistribution of treasure by making it visible to the people, the act of display becomes a powerful political gesture. In this view, the vast collections that lie in the reserve become things that the museum keeps away from the people. This arouses suspicions that the museum’s commitment to the public is only skin-deep, and that it is in fact lapsing into the format of feudal treasure-houses by keeping items of great significance hidden away in its crypt.

A second reason why publics scrutinise museum display so closely might derive from the fact that museums have long been arbiters of value. To call a thing ‘museum-quality’ is the ultimate stamp of approval of its worth and significance. But the public perceives not what the museum collects but what the museum puts on show. The idea that the museum values most highly what it displays most prominently has led to arguments about what should be exhibited, and campaigns have been mounted to make museums acknowledge the work of disadvantaged groups – women artists, or artists of colour, or the cultural achievements of diverse ethnic groups – by not just collecting their works but by putting them on display, facilitating their inclusion within the canon of art.

These emphases on display come from outside the museum, through pressures applied by members of the public or by the evolving art world. But there are also pressures within the museum that cause it to emphasise what happens in the galleries over the activities that take place in its unseen zones. In an era when museums are compelled to increase their revenue, they often focus their energies on modernising their galleries or mounting temporary exhibitions to bring more and more audiences through the door. In other words, as museums struggle to survive in a competitive economy, their budgets often prioritise those parts of themselves that are consumable: infotainment in the galleries, goods and services in the cafes and the shops. The unlit, unglamorous storerooms, if they are ever discussed, are at best presented as service areas that process objects for the exhibition halls. And at worst, as museums pour more and more resources into their publicly visible faces, the spaces of storage may even suffer, their modernisation being kept on hold or being given less and less space to house the expanding collections and serve their complex conservation needs.

Liminal spaces of the scholars’ rooms

In the popular imagination, it is only the objects in the galleries that have a ‘life’: objects in the store lie entombed, inert and disregarded. But museum spaces have always had been organised along gradations that are more complex than the simple binary of display (where all visitors see everything) versus the store (where nobody sees anything). Behind the galleries of many museums lie liminal spaces that include archives, study rooms and libraries that are not open to the public, but are accessible to scholars, usually by appointment. These are spaces that have been and still are centres of scholarly pursuit. Here, researchers are given privileged access to objects especially taken out of the store for them to study.

These hushed and semi-private rooms hark back to an earlier era and another genealogy of museums. Not all museums have their origin in royal treasure houses that have been thrown open to the public. Many museums derive from the efforts of scholars who built collections in the pursuit of knowledge. The Wunderkammern or curiosity cabinets of Renaissance Europe are well-known: these were collections of curious and rare things gathered for the study or entertainment of noblemen or scholars.⁶ As more and more curiosities poured into Europe from all corners of the world in the age of exploration, some cabinets turned into expansive collections of natural history, coins, and antiquities. These collections were gathered by scholars in their individual capacities, or were sponsored by certain courts that supported scholars, or were part of universities. While these collections were sealed off from the general public, they were shared with other scholars. Open to a small circle of intellectual elites, these cabinets were the locus of a circumscribed sociality of the collector and his peers.

Revisiting the history of museum storage areas reveals a range of spaces aligned to the needs not of a public, but of these smaller and more specialised audiences. James Delbourgo’s essay in this volume looks at the figure of an emblematic scholar-gentleman, Sir Hans Sloane, whose collection laid the foundation of the British Museum. Examining the fate of the materials in this collection, Delbourgo’s essay reminds us of the fact that in the earlier history of museum study rooms, gentlemen-scholars were allowed to handle, touch, smell and even taste the samples in the drawers. When this collection was opened into a larger public, the terms of encounter had to change: the collection was now untouchable, unsmellable and untastable; visitors were allowed to perceive the collection only through the sense of sight, for visual contact alone was believed to not consume or use up the object.⁷

Ironically, as museum audiences grew, the museum opened its door to more people, but showed them less of its collection. When audiences expanded in size and changed in character to include more laypersons and fewer specialists, the museum had to shift the nature of its address. Large parts of the collection that had been of interest to scholars and which had been available for consultation by them became simply un-showable as they were not aesthetically attractive to, or easily comprehended by, the new audience. As is demonstrated by the essay on the National Gallery in London in this volume by Susanna Avery-Quash and Alan Crookham, art collections segregated ‘masterworks’ from the rest of the artefacts which were now designated as the ‘study collection’. Only the former were placed on selective display. In science or archaeology museums too, only a small number of the most attractive or complete specimens were now chosen to be placed in an increasingly aestheticised display while the remainder of the objects were kept in reserve.

Chapters in this volume show how modern-day museums sought to address their dual responsibility to a large general public on the one hand, and a small scholarly community on the other, by maintaining both galleries and study rooms. I...