Museums in the Material World

Simon Knell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9780415416986
• eBook ISBN: 9781134115884
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Museum Administration
• Index: Business

Museums in the Material World seeks to both introduce classic and thought-provoking pieces and contrast them with articles which reveal grounded practice. The articles are selected from across the full breadth of museum disciplines and are linked by a logical narrative, as detailed in the section introductions.

The choice of articles reveals how the debate has opened up on disciplinary practice, how the practices of the past have been critiqued and in some cases replaced, how it has become necessary to look beyond and outside disciplinary boundaries, and how old practices can in many circumstances continue to have validity.

Museums in the Material World is about broadening horizons and moving museum studies students, and others, beyond the narrow confines of their own disciplinary thinking or indeed any narrow conception of collections. In essence, this is a book about the practice of interpretation and will therefore be of great use to those students and museum practitioners involved in the field of material culture in museums.

Chapter 1

Museums, reality and the material world

Simon J. Knell

‘I have a question for you,’ he said, taking out of his pocket a crumpled piece of paper on which he had scribbled a few key words. He took a breath: ‘Do you believe in reality?’ ‘But of course!’ I laughed . . . Has reality truly become something people have to believe in, I wondered, the answer to a serious question asked in a hushed and embarrassed tone? Is reality something like God, the topic of a confession reached after a long and intimate discussion? Are there people on earth who don’t believe in reality? . . . his relief proved clearly enough that he had anticipated a negative reply, something like ‘Of course not! Do you think I am that naïve?’ This was not a joke, then: he really was concerned.

(Bruno Latour 1999: 1–2)

IN THE CLOSING DECADES of the twentieth century, scientists found themselves at war, embroiled in disputes over method, authority, the sanctity of evidence, the hand of God, and even the certainties of reality. Bruno Latour, in this opening passage from Pandora’s Hope, knew well enough the propaganda and misinformation which confused both sides in the Science Wars; despite his indignation he knew that the ‘highly respected psychologist’ who asked him this question was not alone in being unsure about the level of subjectivity and relativism the other side was willing to admit. Some had certainly denied a knowable reality. Scientists, however, remained resolute in their methods and beliefs. Once wholly scientific, many anthropologists were by then taking large doses of such mind-altering drugs as feminism and postcolonialism, in an attempt to destroy their inner devils: objectification, homogenization, exoticization (Heshusius and Ballard 1996; Rapport and Overing 2000: 98). ‘The history of ethnography’, Roth (1989: 556) claimed, ‘is one of successive constitution and dissolution of “modes of ethnographic authority” ’; Herzfeld (1997: 302) called it a ‘crisis of representation’. Such were the maladies of archaeologists, as they made their ‘New Archaeology’ old, that they were willing to take any drug they could lay their hands on. ‘How do we do archaeology at all?’ they exclaimed as they strove to establish their own disciplinary identity beyond the natural sciences, anthropology and history (Hodder and Hutson 2004: 4). Historians, who once considered their own discipline scientific, now found themselves rematerialised in a world of relativistic constructivism. What point was there to history if any possibility of reconstruction was an illusion? In Australia particularly, but also elsewhere, a ‘postcolonial breeze’ began to alter interpretations of the past, forcing historians into wars of their own (Macintyre and Clark 2003). In contrast, historians of art for the most part seemed as sure of their field as the scientists, although some were, they felt, staring into the face of disciplinary oblivion: ‘Is the undoing of modernity the end of art history as we know it?’ Preziosi (1998: 277) asked. The artist was now playing with the art world. Anthropologist Alfred Gell (1996) saw the rise of conceptual art as ‘the final convergence of artmaking, art history, art philosophy and art criticism’ – the replacement of aesthetics with reactionism; art was now an ‘evocation of complex intentionalities’. While some, as they climbed into Tracey Emin’s bed, saw the traditions of still life and classical sculpture in Damien Hirst’s ‘over-exposed’ shark, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991), others saw Hirst’s pickled fish as the embodiment of the postmodern condition: cynical and mocking through the very objects and institutions which underpinned modernity and permitted his work to be displayed as art (Spring 1997).

Onlookers, like Latour’s psychologist, might well have believed that the intellectual world had been consumed in a pandemic of politicised subjectivity which saw former authorities rise up, zombie-like, with the single aim of destroying their structured and empirical existence. They might also have imagined – had not museums already slipped into the intellectual backwater, residues of a modernity now surpassed in the relentless pursuit of progress – that these institutions, the icons of Enlightenment thinking, would be the first port of call for the angry mob. A few, it is true, charged around the galleries, smashing cases with barbed words, in old neglected galleries which still promoted a nineteenth-century racism or modern ones which discussed the atom bomb, slavery or living ‘Others’ without recognising a new need for inclusive engagement. But others, on opening the doors to the museum, were amazed to find, in the smell of wood polish, among the serried rows of fossils, in the photograph that sat beside the weaving frame and in the lever waggling interactive placed beneath the ceiling-hung aeroplanes, a treasure house of a rather different kind. Not one of a million ordered facts or of a chaos of curiosities, but rather the very essence of everything that was ‘modern’ in buildings that also spoke of modernity’s antiquity. Many of those who made this discovery were not strangers to the museum at all: they had lived their lives there as professionals or as museum studies academics, but suddenly they found a veil had been lifted and the museum had changed.

Others slipped in sideways, opening a side door in such disciplines as sociology, history and anthropology, to discover the museum’s strange practices, hidden powers, and extraordinary collections for the first time. If the museum was a physical embodiment of Enlightenment thinking, it was now also the subject of a new enlightenment, that of postmodernism. For one could now annotate the institution, its position in society, its processes, values, and so on with the labels of that penetratingly cynical mode of thinking – identity, power, legitimisation, subjugation, representation, construction – and diagrammatically show the nebulous and reflexive structure of postmodernism itself. The museum revealed a new kind of order; the latest phase in a history of ordering: postmodernism’s body, apparently composed of nebulous doubting subjectivity, had buried within it its own universal anatomy – an anatomy no less judgmental, authoritative and pervasive as the metanarratived modernism which some wished to render dead.

The museum became what it had rarely been: delightfully contentious. Gone, so it seemed, was any notion of the museum as trusted purveyor of knowledge and learning – ‘disinterested’ and apolitical; who now could claim anything as neutral? The annotations of postmodernism soon became a political agenda for actual change. The museum was to be a place of pluralism and inclusion. The broadcasting of supposedly unmediated and objective facts was to be replaced by opportunities for ‘meaning making’. History was now identity, to be democratised and performed in a ‘dreamspace’ where one’s very being could be re-invented and mythologised. Eilean Hooper-Greenhill’s (2000: 152–3) notion of the ‘post-museum’ saw a future less concerned with the tangible, which was unbounded (both physically and intellectually) in the experiences it could offer. More radical still was the proposed ‘feminisation’ of the museum: ‘Rather than upholding the values of objectivity, rationality, order and distance, the post-museum will negotiate responsiveness, encourage mutually nurturing partnerships, and celebrate diversity.’ Hooper-Greenhill noted that this new kind of museum was not likely to emerge in those Western centres of the ‘modernist museum’ but elsewhere. Fearing the force of repatriation in postmodernism’s postcolonial backwash, the most powerful museums then turned the manly universalism of Enlightenment to political effect: the ‘Enlightenment museum’ was to be reinvented as the ‘museum of everyman’, democratised, worldly and inclusive. The material world, so carefully bottled and boxed in a museum history stretching over centuries, now had its own ‘home guard’; and it now had more politics than it ever cared to know.

Museum Studies, once a vehicle for the training of students in established professional practices and standards (Singleton 1966), had become, in the process, an intellectual playground. Only vaguely bounded, it claimed an interest in all societies, in most disciplines, in the material world in totality, and most aspects of education and communication. In the true sense of architectural postmodernism, museum studies became eclectic and fostered illusions. Those who did not enter it believed it was simply a place where people learned how to accumulate things and put them in glass cases; those who did take a look inside, however, now found a discipline debating representation and censorship or social practice and the Enlightenment mission, and relating these to thoughtful practices that would indeed support the diverse needs of disciplinary knowledge, inclusive societies and cultural preservation. Some mockingly suggested that this was an indulgence in theory, but they failed to see that the field had grown sophisticated and more responsive. One could not continue thinking old thoughts and doing old things, at least not without asking ‘why?’ It wasn’t that museums needed a revolution, they simply needed understanding. Only then could their future be assured, nurtured by a creative and responsive workforce.

The subjective world: politics, culture, interpretation

This is, admittedly, an impressionistic picture of intellectual change as the tide of postmodernism swept through. It took a while for people to get to grips with relativism, to understand that it too was relative, and sometimes relatively unimportant. As with Latour’s psychologist, the change simultaneously confused and liberated, its nebulous form often polarising thought. The museum, as with all public and many private institutions, changed, though that change was driven as much by the faltering rise of liberal politics as it was by the intellectual shift that rise engendered. But was this really a moment as extraordinary for museums as it was for museum studies?

We should perhaps take a moment to consider a longer period and, as we travel from then to now, do what the historian of museums can often fail to do, that is look outside and observe the changing museum context. We need not go too far back, two hundred years will do. And so as not to over-generalise, we shall travel through the English landscape. The journey itself, if an overall impression of the evolving landscape could be captured, would reveal a broad trend of liberalisation accompanying the development of the modern museum, not just over the past 40 years but over the whole period.

Two hundred years ago, the birth of Britain’s provincial museums drew upon an emergent middle class, which included many who had risen on enterprise and now demanded the rights and freedoms previously reserved for those of the state religion and in possession of land. Although exclusive to modern eyes, the (learned) societies which built these museums exploited exclusivity to foster inclusivity: the society and its museum became a means of social adjustment, which helped, to some degree, prevent the new bourgeoisie from leading their riotous underlings in revolution (Knell 2000). Population growth, industrialisation and mass urbanisation produced social and intellectual conditions of revolutionary potential across Europe. But while much of the rest of that continent realised that potential in the middle of that century, Britain managed to avert calamity. A series of major political reforms in the 1830s helped make this possible, but we should not forget the role played by museums. Nearly every major industrial town established or possessed a philosophical society in the 1820s where politically and religiously neutral topics – such as the ‘brand new’ and fashionable science of geology (which had less religious opposition than is traditionally thought) – were discussed. In so doing, these societies performed acts of social adjustment which overcame political and religious difference and which brought together new blood with blue blood. These acts of inclusive engagement made the societies, and the museums they fostered, tick. It gave them social relevance.

However, by the middle of the century, social commentators were criticising the elitism of these societies and their museums having rather forgotten their necessity, 30 years earlier, as ‘local parliaments’. Now social change and the push for a democratic and educated society called for greater inclusion and the throwing open of museum doors to the masses. The museum was to be reinvented in this era of mechanics institutes – institutions aimed at a different social class but remaining largely middle-class inventions and manipulations. Educational opportunity was progressively filtering down in society, slowly permitting the eradication of the social imprisonments of class, race and gender. Only through education could an individual realise his or her potential; but also, so it was thought (and the argument was still being made by Public Understanding of Science advocates in the 1980s), only through education could the citizen become an informed democrat rather than a subjective political anarchist. Those who made museums in the 1870s did so in a rather different context of mixed gender field clubs of a kind that would have seemed quite alien to the gentlemen who made their local parliaments a half century before. Accompanying and following the field clubs, the notion of the ‘educational museum’ took hold, with that at Haslemere in Surrey acting as an exemplar. It offered a more inclusive view of education; the museum was now more inclusively inclusive.

Had a field of museum studies accompanied these social changes of the nineteenth century, its theoretical framework would have had to have shifted quite drastically at least every 30 years; as it was, ideas about museums changed continually, though there were, indeed, also periods of revolt as I have indicated. They were also not immune from relentless technological ‘progress’. Today, from my office in the UK, I can visit a museum in New Zealand, virtually, in a second or so – something I could not do when I moved to this university in 1992. But this is little different from the Victorian scientist who could in 1842 catch an ‘extravagantly cheap’ train into the distant wilds of England, collect some key objects and return home in time for supper. Previously such activity was far more expensive both in time and cost. Charles Dickens captured this change perfectly in Bleak House:

Railroads shall soon traverse all this country, and with a rattle and a glare the engine and train shall shoot like a meteor over the wide night-landscape, turning the moon paler; but as yet such things are nonexistent in these parts, though not wholly unexpected. Preparations are afoot, measurements are made, ground is staked out. Bridges are begun, and their not yet united piers desolately look at one another over roads and streams like brick and mortar couples with an obstacle to their union; fragments of embankments are thrown up and left as precipices with torrents of rusty carts and barrows tumbling over them; tripods of tall poles appear on hilltops, where there are rumours of tunnels; everything looks chaotic and abandoned in full hopelessness. Along the freezing roads, and through the night, the post-chaise makes its way without a railroad on its mind. (Dickens 1853)

Dickens began writing Bleak House in 1851, the year the Great Exhibition opened in London, a moment when the British public’s sense of self and world utterly changed. Dickens’s sketch, similarly, describes the moment before a revolution which many of his readers had experienced. Here distances measured by post-chaise were to shrink under locomotive wheels; the interpretive frame by which people understood the world was about to expand. Simultaneously, the English rural idyll was to be hopelessly displaced by noisy, smoky machines; normality had shifted and what was there before now seemed increasingly worthy of museum preservation. Towns and museums once out of reach were now simply an affordable day trip away, and if museums really were nodes on a nationwide network of knowledge, as was claimed in the 1820s, then the Victorians had now learned to surf. And as they surfed into these museums, their heads conceiving an already shrinking world, they would look through eyes that were also changed in other ways, perhaps also altered by Dickens’s cynical contempt for social injustice.

So, before we begin to consider the relationship of the museum to the modern material world, we must put aside any notion that we exist in an era unlike any other in terms of experiencing change or changing ways of seeing. We don’t see as our predecessors did, but nor did they as theirs did. To see postmodernism as the rail buffers into which ‘the Enlightenment project’ crashed is to suffer delusions. A little cynicism never hurt anyone, and through it society puts in place the checks and balances it feels it needs. In our time, museums have responded with pluralism to counter inequality and localism to defend against the homogenising influence of globalism, identity to foster personal conceptions of value and democracy to check the power of privilege. These don’t seem particularly peculiar or threatening actions. To a liberal mind, they seem right. But are these postmodernist or postcolonial outcomes so vastly different from the humanism for which Dickens was admired?

Postmodernism has been about adjusting the interpretive frame, about questioning and exposing our modern interpretive workhouses. It has been about making the implicit explicit. For those concerned with culture, postmodernism, and the plethora of philosophies and ideologies it has hidden beneath its umbrella, represented a big and pervasive change of interpretive frame. If the museum founders’ formational dance of patronage and membership of nearly two centuries ago was performed to the music of contemporary expectation, music everyone understood but few articulated (Bulwer-Lytton 1830), some thirty years later its elitist heart was exposed. Today, we have no difficulty in exposing that social underbelly; postmodernism has ensured that we have all become sociologists. So if we see postmodernism as an interpretive frame, then we can relate it to other such frames, or ways of seeing. Science, like all disciplines, changes its interpretive frameworks all the time, generally in piecemeal fashion but also by revolution. For example, if, to evolutionists, Darwin was alive in the late nineteenth century, he was ‘dead’ in the early twentieth (at least in the USA), but reincarnated in the middle of that century (Simpson 1978: 114; Larson 2004: 224); a catastrophic view of the formation of the Earth was abandoned in the 1820s, but reawakened in 1980; in the 1990s catastrophism was shaping evolutionary thinking. Darwin would have understood both concepts but would have been extraordinarily surprised by this turn of events.

Postmodernism as an interpretive shift was no respecter of disciplinary boundaries; it seemed to challenge everything, even disciplinarity itself. Interpretation, that central act of ‘reading’ and ‘presenting’ performed in all museum actions, was built around that disciplinarity, but postmodernism – and particularly postcolonialism (broadly defined) – challenged its absolute right to dominate museum making and museum practice. Postmodernism, as with every other interpretive frame, placed spectacles before the eyes of the interpreter giving visual acuteness to those things considered important and throwing out of focus things that now became superfluous and irrelevant ‘noise’. This wearing of different spectacles opens the mind, and one feels compelled to try others. Many modern students of the material world, for example, have been quick to pick up the antique spectacles of such late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century workers as Mauss and Simmel, and their resulting work has revealed the utility of changing one’s glasses from time to time, and, indeed, that sometimes it is useful to combine new minds with old ‘specs’. This book, then, is a book of spectacles: spectacles to look through and spectacles to look at. It is an opportunity to see things differently and to question what is implicit in the lenses of our own interpretive glasses.

Museums and material culture studies

So is the museum a cathedral to materialism, to Enlightenment knowledge, to modernity? The buildings and ordered collections that we have inherited speak of such things, but they do so because we can no longer see the makers, only the made. It is easy as a result to adopt a view that presupposes a museum engagement with the material world which had the abstract sterility of the science laboratory. The science laboratory, of course, was long ago debunked as a place of scientific purity and there really is no reason to perpetuate this myth of museums either. The museum has always had that same mix of intellectual (in startlingly varying degrees) aspiration and social politics. The supposedly objective collection conceals irrational passions, poetry, debts, claims, and so on, mixed with all those museum inadequacies and vices: neglect, territorialism, bias, poverty, ignorance, and misunderstanding. And while we rightly push objects and collections to the fore as the distinguishing features of museums, we need to remember that if those objects are ‘made to speak’, they do so through a human act of authorship with all its editing, contextual manipulation, and censorship. This combines in an interpretive coupling of speaker and listener where both are manipulating meaning, often unknowingly. But in this ‘conversation’, is the object active or passive? Does it embody and communicate some aspect of ourselves or is it simply a slave to our words and thoughts?

Perhaps the ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Series Preface
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1: Museums, Reality and the Material World
• Part One The Objective World
• Part Two The Subjective World
• Part Three The Consumed World
• Part Four The Transient World