Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge

Eileen Hooper Greenhill

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 1992
• ISBN:
  9781134912698
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Museum Administration
• Index: Business

Museums have been active in shaping knowledge over the last six hundred years. Yet what is their function within today's society? At the present time, when funding is becoming increasingly scarce, difficult questions are being asked about the justification of museums. Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge presents a critical survey of major changes in current assumptions about the nature of museums. Through the examination of case studies, Eilean Hooper-Greenhill reveals a variety of different roles for museums in the production and shaping of knowledge. Today, museums are once again organising their spaces and collections to present themselves as environments for experimental and self-directed learning.

1 What is a museum?

What is a museum? Museums are no longer built in the image of that nationalistic temple of culture, the British Museum. Today, almost anything may turn out to be a museum, and museums can be found in farms, boats, coal mines, warehouses, prisons, castles, or cottages. The experience of going to a museum is often closer to that of going to a theme park or a funfair than that which used to be offered by the austere, glass-case museum.

The last few years have seen a major shifting and reorganisation of museums. Change has been extreme and rapid, and, to many people who loved museums as they were, this change has seemed unprecedented, unexpected, and unacceptable. It has thrown previous assumptions about the nature of museums into disarray. The recent changes have shocked most those who felt that they knew what museums were, how they should be, and what they should be doing.

This fixed view of the identity of museums has sometimes been firmly held and, until recently, little has disturbed it. But it is a mistake to assume that there is only one form of reality for museums, only one fixed mode of operating. Looking back into the history of museums, the realities of museums have changed many times. Museums have always had to modify how they worked, and what they did, according to the context, the plays of power, and the social, economic, and political imperatives that surrounded them. Museums, in common with all other social institutions, serve many masters, and must play many tunes accordingly. Perhaps success can be defined by the ability to balance all the tunes that must be played and still make a sound worth listening to.

At the present time, in many areas where decisions are made about the funding and maintenance of museums, hard questions are now being asked about the justification of museums, about their role in the community, and their functions and potentials. Where the answers are not forthcoming, or where perceptions of the value of museums are low in relation to other priorities, collections are sold, staff dismissed, and buildings closed. In most cases the answers that are given are that museums are educational institutions. Today, the educational role of museums is claimed as a major justification. The director of the Museums Association, for example, argued to Derbyshire County Council on the occasion of their decision to sell some of their collections, that:

Museums and their collections are a valuable and irreplaceable community service and have immense educational value. To show no interest in keeping the museum collection is to show no interest in education and in preserving an awareness of Derbyshire and its history and culture.

(The Independent 6 September 1990)

Knowledge is now well understood as the commodity that museums offer. An example makes this clear. As part of the new ethos of corporate involvement in museums and galleries, the opportunity to change one’s perception or knowledge of the world through a visit to an art gallery is offered by those whose funding makes exhibitions possible. In an advertisement in The Independent Colour Supplement (8 September 1990), for example, a sponsor of the Monet exhibition at the Royal Academy in the autumn of 1990, proclaimed:

Discover how one man’s vision can change the way you look at the world.

In every series, no two pictures are exactly alike. A single theme. The same object. But enveloped in varying light, changing seasons and atmosphere. This is Monet in the ’90s.

Digital Equipment Corporation and its employees are proud to sponsor the exhibition that brings together, for the first time, the series paintings of Claude Monet.

This, in the form of an advertisement, and used to celebrate corporate values, is a proclamation about how knowing can alter seeing. Our perception of the world, we are told, will be different once we know and are familiar with these paintings. The statement is a recognition of the way in which museums and galleries can alter perception, and can contribute to knowledge.

But if museums are places in which we may come to know new things, and where our perceptions may radically change, what is the nature of this knowing, and how are these changes brought about?

It is only fairly recently that museums have been subjected to any rigorous form of critical analysis. In the past, museums have somehow escaped the careful study to which schooling, or the media, for example, have been subjected. The hidden curriculum and the unseen and unspoken but powerful, underlying assumptions that construct what counts as knowledge in school curricula have been exposed (Young, 1975). Television programmes have equally been closely observed and the ideological, economic, and cultural elements that have formed the apparently seamless products that we consume daily have been exposed (Glasgow University Media Group, 1972; 1980; 1982; Williams, 1974). The study of the way in which knowing is enabled, constructed, and consumed in schools, through films, in television, and in literature, is well established. However, the analysis of the various elements that together make up the ‘reality’ that we call ‘the museum’ has barely begun.

This book asks some very basic questions. What does ‘knowing’ in museums mean? What counts as knowledge in the museum? Or to put it another way, what is the basis of rationality in the museum? What is acceptable and what is regarded as ridiculous, and why? Does this change over time? How are individual people expected to perform in museums? What is the role of the visitor and what is the role of the curator? How are material things constructed as objects within the museum? How are individuals constructed as subjects? What is the relationship of space, time, subject, and object? And, perhaps the question that subsumes all the others, how are ‘museums’ constructed as objects? Or, what counts as a museum?

There have been very few critical studies in relation to the museum and virtually all of these have been written from outside a direct experience of the museum as a profession. Museum workers have, until recently, remained unaware of their practices, and uncritical of the processes that they are engaged in every day. Within the practices of the museum, the aspect of criticism, or of developed reflection on day-to-day work, has been very weak indeed. Critical reflection is, indeed, still actively resisted by some curators who see themselves as practical people who have no time to waste on this unproductive activity. Most museum work, until very recently, proceeded without identified objectives, without generally agreed and understood institutional policies, and in a context of received opinion (Burrett, 1985; Miles, 1985; Prince and Schadla-Hall, 1985).

The lack of examination and interrogation of the professional, cultural, and ideological practices of museums has meant both a failure to examine the basic underlying principles on which current museum and gallery practices rest, and a failure to construct a critical history of the museum field. The structure of rationality that informs the way in which museumscome into being, both at the present time and in the past, is taken as unproblematic, and therefore as a given.

Most explanations of museums do not take the concept of rationality as problematic, although it might be argued that the museum in its role as the ‘Classifying House’ (Whitehead, 1970; 1971) is and has been actively engaged over time in the construction of varying rationalities. ‘Rationality’ is understood as something which is self-evident and which needs no explanation:

The fundamental role of the museum in assembling objects and maintaining them within a specific intellectual environment emphasizes that museums are storehouses of knowledge as well as storehouses of objects, and that the whole exercise is liable to be futile unless the accumulation of objects is strictly rational.

(Cannon-Brookes, 1984:116)

But if museum workers have been unaware of the effects of their practices, others have not been so blind. Michel Foucault points graphically to the extraordinary effect of systems of classification in the Preface to The Order of Things, where he points out that:

This book first arose out of a passage in Borges, out of the laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my thought—our thought, the thought that bears the stamp of our age and our geography—breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things, and continued long afterwards to disturb and threaten with collapse our age-old distinction between the Same and the Other. This passage quotes a ‘certain Chinese encyclopedia’ in which it is written that ‘animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camel-hair brush, (1) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies’. In the wonderment of this taxonomy, the thing that we apprehend in one great leap, the thing that, by means of this fable, is demonstrated as the charm of another system of thought, is the limitation of our own, the stark impossibility of thinking that.

(Foucault, 1970:xv)

The system of classification, ordering, and framing, on which such a list is based is so fundamentally alien to our western way of thinking as to be, in fact, ‘unthinkable’, and, indeed, ‘irrational’. But presumably the list was regarded as rational, and as a valid way of knowing. How can we be sure that there is not a rationality that explains the sense of the list?

To be able to make sense of such a list would be mind-expanding and would offer new possibilities of classifying the world, and even new ways of living in it. It would certainly demand new ways of organising museum and art gallery collections. The separations we know between ‘fine and decorative art’ and ‘natural history’ for example, would collapse. Many of the taxonomies that we use to explain the interrelationships of objects and species would need to be rewritten, and collections would need to be reordered; paintings, artefacts, and specimens would need to be placed differently within display cases, their records and documentation would need to be re-examined and amended; their positions in storage drawers, cabinets, and racks would need to be changed. In other words, if we accepted as ‘true’ the classification that Foucault describes, the work of curators in identifying, controlling, ordering, and displaying their collections would have to begin all over again.

If new taxonomies mean new ways of ordering and documenting collections, then do the existing ways in which collections are organised mean that taxonomies are in fact socially constructed rather than ‘true’ or ‘rational’? Do the existing systems of classification enable some ways of knowing, but prevent others? Are the exclusions, inclusions, and priorities that determine whether objects become part of collections, also creating systems of knowledge? Do the rituals and power relationships that allow some objects to be valued and others to be rejected operate to control the parameters of knowledge in the same way as the timetabling rituals and the power relationships of teachers, governors, pupils, and the state operate to make some school subjects more valuable than others?

Taxonomies within the museum have not been considered in relation to the rational possibilities that they might enable or prevent. Classification in the museum has taken place within an ethos of obviousness. The selection and ordering processes of museums are rarely understood as historically and geographically specific, except at a very rudimentary level:

Collecting is a very basic activity, in that food-gathering is a characteristic of all animals, but, setting aside the activities of certain species of birds, the systematic collecting of objects which fulfil a cerebral, as against bodily, function is confined to a limited number of cultures and societies of man.

(Cannon-Brookes, 1984:115)

In the same way as the signification of the identity of collections and museums is taken as a given, so too is the identity of specific material things. The construction of material things as ‘objects’ of a particular character is not perceived as problematic. Things are what they are. There is little idea that material things can be understood in a multitude of different ways, that many meanings can be read from things, and that this meaning can be manipulated as required. Although we are familiar with the way in which advertisements, for example, select and manipulate images of material objects in relation to their associative and relational potentials, it is not understood that the ways in which museums ‘manipulate’ material things also set up relationships and associations, and in fact create identities (Barthes, 1977).

Similarly, the divisions and classifications of objects have not been explored in relation to the way in which this ordering interrelates with the divisions and orderings of spaces and of individuals. If a museum accepts a new collection, for example of nineteenth-century mechanical banks or of sixteenth-century sedan chairs, this will immediately create a need for either a new subject position (a new professional post) to be created, or, if this is impossible, an existing subject role will have to be modified through fragmentation. The curator of social history (or decorative art) will have to split his/her existing workload to accommodate the demands of the new collection. Research must be done and new knowledge must be created through the writing of catalogues and monographs, and the mounting of exhibitions. New spaces must be found, or old ones adapted. Perhaps there will be less room for the Chippendale chairs, particularly if the sedan chairs are in excellent condition and used to belong to significant people, and the Chippendale chairs are not in good condition. New systems of priority must be determined. As this process goes on, the identity of the museum shifts and modulates.

Decisions in museums and galleries about how to position material things in the context of others are determined by a number of factors including the existing divisions between objects, the particular curatorial practices of the specific institution, the physical condition of the material object, and the interests, enthusiasms, and expertise of the curator in question.

Although the ordering of material things takes place in each institution within rigidly defined distinctions that order individual subjects, curatorial disciplines, specific storage or display spaces, and artefacts and specimens, these distinctions may vary from one institution to another, being equally firmly fixed in each. The same material object, entering the disciplines of different ensembles of practices, would be differently classified. Thus a silver teaspoon made during the eighteenth century in Sheffield would be classified as ‘Industrial Art’ in Birmingham City Museum, ‘Decorative Art’ at Stoke-on-Trent, ‘Silver’ at the Victoria and Albert Museum, and ‘Industry’ at Kelham Island Museum in Sheffield. The other objects also so classified would be different in each case, and the meaning and significance of the teaspoon itself correspondingly modified.

Within museums there is much discussion in relation to location and retrieval of things, that is, the control of the artefact within the space of the museum and in relation to other artefacts and specimens (Thompson, 1984:113–376), but these spatial divisions are not problematised in terms of what they enable and what they conceal. The axis of visibility that operates in relation to subject, object, and space is not interrogated as to the representations that are constructed. In many cases the axis is not itself perceived. Relationships of subject and object are taken as given, as natural. A strong public/private division is in operation which positions subjects either as ‘members of the public’ or as ‘museum curators’. Although many museums are concerned to ‘broaden the audience’, this is generally seen as an extension of the already existing distinctions between individual subjects. A rigid division is maintained between the collecting subject as curator, and the viewing subject as visitor, even though in other articulations of practices these distinctions might be reversed. In visiting museums other than their own, for example, curators are invisible as professionals unless they so declare themselves by playing out a particular ritual that secures specific privileges such as being taken ‘behind the scenes’, being allowed to handle or get closer to objects, or perhaps even give an opinion about the identity of an object.

Power relations within museums and galleries are skewed towards the collecting subject who makes decisions in relation to space, time, and visibility; in other words as to what may be viewed, how it should be seen, and when this is possible. For the public, interaction with the collections other than at the level of looking at fully completed and immaculately presented displays is generally severely curtailed, and because of this, definitions of the meanings of the collections are restricted to the private sphere of the museum worker. Those curators who understand how these practices place them in positions of power, and who wish to reduce this personal power, are finding ways to offer more opportunities to others to construct and impose their own interpretations (Fewster, 1990). Interestingly, this generally means that curatorial practices, which were after all designed to keep objects out of the public view, have to be completely reworked.

On the whole, however, the existing make-up of museums with its rather rigid relationships is taken as given. These givens are projected back in time to explain the identities of museums at other historical moments and in other geographical spaces. Thus the writing of museum history up until now has consisted in taking the existing relationships in museums and placing them as far back in time as possible, and then identifying a forward linear development of these relationships. ‘Museums’ from other historical periods are seen as the ‘direct ancestors’ of the forms of museum that exist at the present time (Taylor, 1987:202). ‘The modern museum effectively dates from the Renaissance…. Even at that time, however, one can already see the dual role of museums: to exhibit objects and to provide a working collection for scholars’ (Whitehead, 1981:7).

This ‘blind’ history, and this failure to analyse, understand, and articulate the practices of the present, has some serious consequences. Firstly, there is a difficulty in accommodating a plurality of histories. This is particularly acute in relation to museums, as there is an extreme diversity of forms, with varying funding a...